The Week in Washington 2

Joe Sandler Clarke

As of 26th February 2011, thousands of people were outside the State Capitol in Wisconsin fighting to prevent Republican Governor Scott Walker taking away the collective bargaining rights of trade unions in that state. Despite Walker’s claims that the apparent assault on trade union rights has been made necessary by Wisconsin’s sizeable budget deficit; the move is widely seen as being part of broader Republican plan to dismantle the powers of trade unions and boost those of large corporations. “Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin seems like more of an assault on unions,” said President Obama when questioned on the subject. The University of Washington History Professor James Gregory was firmer in his comments on the events, calling the move by Walker “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. Yet there are some in America who do not find the events so “troubling.”

Members of the Tea Party Movement were quickly bussed into Wisconsin to hold counter-demonstrations against the trade unionists. Armed with their usual banners and incoherent ramblings, they shouted, chanted and eventually went home; a pattern likely to be repeated many times over as the fight between Governor Walker and the trade unions continues. Yet while there was nothing new in these Tea Party protests, the counter demonstrations did give some of their rhetoric real meaning. Since they emerged in 2009, the numerous factions of the Tea Party Movement have repeatedly professed their desire to “take their country back” – but until now from whom and to where they’d like to take it back has been unclear. The head of the Tea Party support group, FreedomWorks, has argued that the movement wants remove America “from moneyed special interests, leftist advocacy groups and arrogant politicians,” yet for most within the movement such rhetoric has a more emotional, rather than political, appeal.

“When the Tea Party supporters talk about ‘taking our country back’, they are, in part, expressing nostalgia.” British journalist Gary Younge argues “They literally want to take it backwards to a past when people had job security, and a couple on a middle class wage could reasonable expect their children to have a better life than their own”. Indeed, for the overwhelmingly white, middle-class, fiscal and social conservatives that make up the Tea Party, the notion of ‘taking America back’ has tremendous appeal in an age of economic uncertainty and changing social norms. They literally want to go back to a time when atheism wasn’t known, when abortion was illegal and when a middle-class family could afford to own their own home. The Tea Party-supported Republican’s in the House of Representatives have recently written a bill that would effectively make getting an abortion impossible in the US, if passed; while Tea Party-backed Republicans in some states have, remarkably, hinted at making attempts to retract child labour laws passed in the early 20th century. This then is what the Tea Partiers mean when they say they want to “take America back.”
In the words of professor James Gregory, the move to end the collective bargaining rights of trade unions in Wisconsin “is a threat not just to unions but to American democratic institutions. The past century has seen a significant expansion of civil rights, including workplace rights, and democratic institutions, including the principle that employees have the right to negotiate terms of employment and be represented by unions.” The Tea Party Movement showed in its counter-demonstrations in Wisconsin that it wants take America back to a time when American’s did not enjoy workplace rights.