Sunrae Yoga

What you don’t know about the Tea Party

Tea Party Key

A guide to understanding Tea Partiers, their language, assumptions, and culture

And a selection from a Lexicon of Select Conservangelican Words and Phrases

 

I’ve lived in the Midwest all of my life. I was born and raised in an evangelical household. My father was a Lutheran minister and my mother the church choir director. Both were lifelong Republicans who voted against FDR as often as they could. They weren’t sure they could ever beat him at the polls but they were pretty sure they would outlive him. They talked about his attempts to pack the Supreme Court like it was a personal slight, like it was family history. They thought Gen. Douglas MacArthur should have kept going into China during the Korean War, and feared that if Jack Kennedy was elected President that the Pope would be calling the shots in U.S. foreign policy. They were ardent Goldwater supporters, identified with Nixon’s Silent Majority and stood by him until they heard the profanity on the White House tapes. Reagan wasn’t conservative enough for them. In my family, Rush Limbaugh sets the agenda for talking points at family gatherings.

I understand the Tea Partiers, what motivates them, the thought process and methodology. These are my people. I love them despite their obvious shortcomings. I will share my insights with you now but, understand, I will pay a price for revealing this inside information. I will become a target and will be ostracized at family gatherings for my disloyalty. I will be so ostracized.

I am a liberal, despite my conservative pedigree. History has put me in this place where I can now be a translator. How did I change allegiance? My parents blame it on liberal college professors. That had some effect, like spending formative years in a place where logic, facts, and critical analysis hold sway. When regarding the Tea Partiers, put all that aside. This is a paradigm for which you have no defenses.

The Concept

If you are a liberal, you’ll need the theoretical underpinning. Think high-context versus low-context culture.

High-context culture is a highly integrated cultural context. No, that has nothing to do with busing kids to school or reverse discrimination. High-context culture is typically found in rural communities, tribal cultures, closely knit groups, urban gangs or the military, groups with well-defined codes of behavior. It was the predominant social structure for the last, well, depending on your point of view, 140 thousand years or six thousand years. The emphasis is on family, clan, tribe, and community. It’s a survival technique, based on individual sacrifice for the benefit of the tribal unit. The belief is, that if the tribe doesn’t survive, then the individuals in it won’t either. You draw your identity from the group. You have a structured, well-defined role in the group that benefits the group. Self-actualization is a low priority. It is highly structured with little internal mobility. However, you know who you are and where you belong. You are connected. It’s exclusive. You have to share commonly held beliefs to prove you belong.

Low-context culture is a typical urban environment. The emphasis is on the individual, and the nation (because a common currency and individual rights are needed to protect individual freedoms, including upward mobility and crossing state lines). There are more individual choices but less connection and fewer overlapping relationships. You can get lost easier. You are compelled to find yourself. Low-context culture is inclusive, based on common experiences and characteristics the members seek out and share with all humans instead of the smaller cultural groups. You have to be able to mingle in the VIP room. When casting about for friends and associates in a low-context culture, you cast a wider net.

 

What is the Tea Party? It’s nothing new and I’m not referring to Boston Harbor. You don’t have to trace the lineage back that far. These are the same people behind the taxpayers revolt of the 1970s, who enthusiastically embraced the Contract with America, were behind the term limits fad and various other fringe activities in recent decades. Yes, they are decidedly Republican – the off-year election and the resulting winnowing of candidates alone made that obvious. Did the Tea Party endorse a single Democrat? They are evangelicals, or members of the religious right. That’s why Glenn Beck could schedule a political rally and seamlessly slide into a religious revival. They are all the usual conservative suspects.

Truth vs. the Truth

Why do Tea Partiers have such disdain for the facts?

My mother often told me her theory of how Pontius Pilate was nearly saved, in the Biblical sense. When King Herod shipped Jesus off to Pontius Pilate for political deniability, during the chitchat it came out that Jesus was, you know, the son of God, the way, the truth and the light. Pilate went for the liberal cocktail party response, retreating to the conceptual, asking, “What is truth?” My mother always claimed that if Pilate had asked, instead, “What is the truth?” that Jesus, a saving machine, hard-wired to save souls, would have obliged. Pilate would have had no defenses against salvation. So, you can see, the whole “truth vs. the truth” debate has been around since the te a tet between Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

The roles have been reversed in the past 2,000 years. Tea Partiers are now the defenders of truth, i.e. Christianity, Capitalism and Democracy, the big Cs and big D, while showing general disregard for the truth, as in scientific certainties, factual information, and computer models that demonstrate imminent destruction of the planet. Why the disdain for the facts?

You have to understand that in a high context culture truth doesn’t come from scientific method. Truth comes from consensus. Information must first pass the test of scrutiny over coffee at Country Kitchens throughout America. Only then does the truth become Truth. That’s tribal culture, folks. That harkens back to the days when the tribe had lots of harmony and very little information as a basis for making decisions.

Let’s say, for example, the tribal unit was on the move, migrating from a depleted hunting ground to greener pastures and, at a fork in the migratory route, had to decide whether to turn east or west, left for right. They didn’t have political parties or Rush Limbaugh to think for them. They didn’t have satellite images or GPS to work with. Information wasn’t the determining factor. What was important was that once they reached a decision, for whatever reason, that everyone was on board. Whether left or right, they would need the warriors, or the horse trainers, or the gardeners, all their cattle and their neighbor’s cattle, everyone in the group, because every role was important to group survival.

Consensus was more important than the facts. The decision over whether to turn east or west might have come down to whether they should follow the rising sun or the setting sun, or follow prevailing winds. Then, as today, rationalizations were important. But the consensus was that they would need the shaman’s skills either way. If he, or she, wasn’t all in, the group was in trouble.

 

From the Conservangelican Lexicon:

 

Born Again: About as far as any conservangelican will go to transform themselves, to be reborn basically the same, only more so.

 

 

About the Author

I’ve been a writer since my hand was amputated at age 12 and I discovered I had a lot to express and needed a way to express it. My understanding of the Tea Part and high-context culture, come from growing up in an evangelical household and teaching on a Native American reservation for 10 years.

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