Tea Party movement has roots in post-World War II right

Consider this allegation: The federal government, under the guise of helping the mentally ill, is establishing a concentration camp in Alaska to house political opponents — a new step on the path toward totalitarianism.

That entirely specious assertion came from conservative political analyst Dan Smoot in 1956, and it briefly became an obsessive cause of the right-wing grass roots, with each new allegation topping the last.

Perhaps this episode sounds vaguely familiar. That’s because Fox News commentator Glenn Beck said last year he had tried but could not refute claims that the Obama administration was creating Federal Emergency Management Agency camps that would house its political opponents.

Remarking on the camps and his failed attempt to “debunk” the allegation, Beck said: “If you have any kind fear that we might be heading toward a totalitarian state, look out. Buckle up. There is something happening in our country and it ain’t good.”

He would later correct his FEMA camp story, but by then the myth had implanted itself.

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

For all its apparent freshness, the Tea Party movement is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Every few years, usually though not always during a Democratic administration, the movement reappears, with a similar set of grievances: The expansion of government is moving us toward socialism; there’s been a dangerous weakening of the national security apparatus but also, paradoxically, the threat of police state provisions at home; an alien subversive of nefarious intentions, composed of cosmopolitan elites and corrupt “one worlders” has infected the government.

In the 1950s, conservatives were angered when their champion, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, was shoved aside by Republican elites in favor of the moderate Dwight Eisenhower.

Kathy Olmsted, a University of California, Davis historian of the period, notes that they accused the one-time Supreme Allied Commander of being a communist agent, an allegation made repeatedly by candy tycoon Robert Welch.

Consider the far-right rallying cry during the presidency of Bill Clinton: Jackbooted government thugs were on the loose; American soldiers were fighting under the U.N. flag; the 1993 tax increase — and yet another failed attempt at health care reform — the marks of a closet socialist.

The most fitting parallel, however, may be the early 1960s, when right-wing activists believed the civil rights movement was the work of the Soviets and, as Ronald Reagan alleged, Medicare a push for socialized medicine.

“The tropes, the rhetoric, the cultural profile — there are profound similarities,” says Rick Perlstein, who has completed two books of a trilogy on the history of the conservative movement and is widely viewed by conservatives and liberals alike as its key chronicler.

Like President Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy was a “first” — the first Catholic president in a nation with a long history of anti-Catholic bigotry and conspiracy theories about powerful papists. Like Obama, Kennedy’s administration was staffed with Eastern elites from the best schools and largest corporations, all viewed warily by Sun Belt and rural Americans.

Another parallel, Olmsted says, the Tea Party movement is not unlike a right-wing activist group of the time, The John Birch Society. “The John Birch Society was extreme, but also connected to the Republican Party, and Republican politicians had to make a decision about whether they were with the movement,” she says.

Then there’s the paranoia: Before, it was communist plots, now it is health care “death panels” and the belief that the administration is eager to seize guns.

Gun sales have skyrocketed since Obama’s election. In November 2008, FBI background checks for prospective gun buyers rose 41.6 percent compared with a year earlier, even though Democratic politicians have shown no interest in meaningful gun control in years and have blamed the issue for electoral losses in 1994 and 2000.

Even reasonable Tea Party activists take it as given that Obama is a socialist. It hardly seems to matter that a significant chunk of the stimulus was a tax cut, or that his chief economist is centrist Larry Summers, or that the bailouts of the auto and banking industries began under President George W. Bush, or that Reagan favored the bailout of Chrysler in 1980, or that Reagan raised taxes to save Social Security.

In 2005, as the left pulled at its hair over imagined Bush conspiracies, conservative columnist David Brooks recalled Richard Hofstadter’s seminal 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.”

David Brown, a Hofstadter biographer and historian at Elizabethtown College, notes that Hofstadter places the populist right in the context of America’s long tradition of paranoid political movements that effectively “magnify the opposition.”

The use of the clinical term “paranoid” to describe the president’s opponents is surely condescending.

“It’s condescending, but it also happens to be true,” says Michael Munger, a Duke University political scientist who is a libertarian and has been a keynote speaker at a number of Tea Party rallies.

He says we’ve reached a tipping point of paranoia and conspiracy mongering, fed by two trends: loss of credibility of official sources culminating, as far as conservatives are concerned, with this administration; and the profusion of media outlets that feed on conspiracy and paranoia.

Perlstein notes that establishment media of the early 1960s acted as a filter against extremism. Walter Cronkite, for instance, would never countenance the likes of Orly Taitz, a leader of the movement to prove Obama was born in Kenya. And, yet, there she is on the cable networks.

As Olmsted notes, “With cable, there’s an endless appetite for feeding the monster. And with Fox, it’s made to order.”