The Pasty Little Putz has decided to tell us all about “The Tea Party Legacy.” He babbles that the movement’s final chapter hasn’t been written yet. In the comments “gemli” from Boston had this to say: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but it’s more terrible when it’s put to use apologizing for ignorance. Douthat is fully aware of the embarrassment the Tea Party has caused this country. That’s why his column is a litany of false equivalences that tries to balance the justifiable outrage of liberals against the Bush/Cheney wars with the awakening of entitlement-hating, homophobic race-baiting zealots.” MoDo has written a beautiful reminiscence. In “Some Like It Hot” she remembers tales of an Arthurian legend who made newspapers crackle. The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “Memorial Day 2050:” How do we motivate people to do something about climate change? In “Graduate of the Year” Mr. Kristof says send a girl to school and educate a village. Seriously, Tay Thi Nguyen, who went hungry and defied her mother to get a degree, plans to return to her village in Vietnam to teach others. In “Read These Lips” Mr. Bruni says one gesture above others makes and measures history, bringing us all face to face. Here’s The Putz:
The Tea Party is finished: smashed, at last, by the power and dollars of the Republican establishment, whose candidates — including Mitch McConnell, the most establishment Republican of all — easily turned back right-wing primary challengers last week.
No, the Tea Party has won: There simply isn’t that much difference between an establishment Republican and a Tea Party Republican anymore, and if grass-roots challengers are losing more races it’s because they’ve succeeded in yanking the party far enough to the right that there isn’t any space for them to fill.
These are the two narratives that swirled around the G.O.P. after last Tuesday’s primaries, and both contain a measure of truth. But there’s a third way to look at the State of the Tea Party, circa 2014, which is that the movement’s political legacy still has a big To Be Determined sticker on it.
To understand why, think about another recent grass-roots movement that reshaped our politics: the netroots/Deaniac/antiwar insurgency, which roiled the Democratic Party between 2003 and the ascendance of Barack Obama.
In a 2008 article for The Nation, the future MSNBC host Chris Hayes profiled some of that insurgency’s activists. He found that while they were (as you would expect) liberal or left-leaning, they were also people who had been mostly apolitical until the Bush era, and who had been prodded into activism by the Iraq-era sense that Something Had Gone Wrong, that an America they took for granted was suddenly imperiled.
This is a useful way to think about Tea Party activism as well. The movement was always essentially right-wing, which is why it was embraced (and, at times, exploited) by the right’s pre-existing network of professionals and pressure groups. But it changed Republican politics precisely because it mobilized Americans who were new to political activism and agitation, and who behaved like people awakened from a slumber to a situation they no longer recognized. Wait, we bailed out Wall Street … ? Our deficits are … how big? And this Barack Hussein Obama, where did he come from?
This mix of passion and paranoia, commitment and confusion, explains why the Tea Party’s precise ideological lineaments were so hard for many observers to discern, why its leaders were so varied — libertarians and evangelicals, entitlement reformers and ex-witches — and why all the attempts to essentialize the movement (as libertarian or authoritarian, anti-Wall Street or pro-Wall Street, pro-military or pro-defense cuts, pro-Medicare or anti-New Deal) didn’t capture its complexity.
Thus Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshaded Medicare blueprints and Herman Cain’s fanciful 9-9-9 plan were both “Tea Party” phenomena. Likewise Glenn Beck’s conspiracy-scrawled blackboards and his teary, apolitical Washington Mall consciousness-raising. Likewise Ron Paul’s and Rick Santorum’s presidential campaigns, in which two ideologically dissimilar Republican politicians both claimed a “Tea Party” mantle.
Likewise Mitt Romney … well, no, actually, the one thing about Republican politics that pretty clearly wasn’t “Tea Party” was the man the G.O.P. ultimately nominated in 2012.
And therein lies a crucial difference between the left-wing insurgency of the Bush era and the right-wing insurgency of the last five years. It isn’t just that the Bush-era Democratic Party didn’t end up as imprisoned by its insurgents’ self-destructive tendencies. (The antiwar movement did not produce a government shutdown, for instance.) It’s also that the Democrats found, in Barack Obama, a liberal politician who could transmute the anger of the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan era into a more uplifting message, and transform a left-vs.-center civil war into a new center-left majority.
For Republicans, no such transformative conservative politician has emerged. But — and this is why the Tea Party’s legacy is unfinished — there are several politicians, all elected as insurgents and all potential presidential candidates in 2016, who still aspire to be the Tea Party’s version of Obama: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And because each embodies different facets of the Tea Party phenomenon, each would write a very different conclusion to its story.
A Rubio victory would probably make the Tea Party seem a little less ideological in hindsight, a little more Middle American and populist, and more like a course correction after George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” than a transformative event.
A Cruz triumph would lend itself to a more ideological reading of the Tea Party’s impact, but one that fit readily into existing categories: It would suggest that Tea Party-ism was essentially the old Reagan catechism in a tricorn hat, movement conservatism under a “don’t tread on me” banner.
A Paul victory would write a starkly libertarian conclusion to the Tea Party’s story, making it seem much more revolutionary — a true break with both Reaganism and Bushism, with an uncertain future waiting beyond.
And what about a Jeb Bush victory, you say? Well, then maybe it will be time to talk, not about the Tea Party’s unsettled legacy, but about its actual defeat.
Here’s MoDo’s reminiscence:
Some people have such a radical vitality, such an electric consciousness, such a lifelong love affair with the world that when they stop breathing, it’s like a wind dying, like the waning and disappearing of a light.
And the world feels duller and dumber and more lackluster without them.
Arthur Gelb, the New York Times editor known as “The Arthurian Legend,” had that constant, overflowing, generous engagement. The world was always putting its hooks in him, and he was always putting his hooks in the world.
Immersed in an “All About Eve” milieu of theater and criticism animated by schadenfreude, Arthur didn’t have any. During my job interview, he told me that he enjoyed being an editor because as a reporter he could think of 17 stories but work on only one at a time, while as an editor he could assign all 17 at once.
He was 17 stories all by himself, the most cultivated ink-stained wretch ever.
Arthur was 90 when he died on Tuesday, and he had written a zesty reminiscence, “City Room,” about the raffish “Front Page” era in journalism. Yet there was nothing fusty about him.
Even in the exuberant age of Abe and Arthur, the tall, kinetic member of the team had a Twitter metabolism and Big Data appetite.
I always associated him with “V” words — Vesuvian, voracious, voltaic. In his imagination, almost any random remark you dropped could be spun into a potential story, causing his eyes to flash and arms to flap.
Once when he invited some reporters to dinner at Sardi’s he spied Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish at a nearby table. “Go interview them!” he whispered to Michi Kakutani, even though there was no news peg and it would run only in the second edition. While she was gone, he had her untouched dinner put in a doggie bag.
The third Eugene O’Neill biography that he wrote with his wife, Barbara, will be published next year. It focuses on the three wives who influenced the playwright and is titled “By Women Possessed.”
That could also work as the title of an Arthur bio. “I like women,” he would say with a shrug.
He especially liked talented, neurotic, operatic women — funny, since his son Peter grew up to be the visionary head of the Met.
Arthur loved getting to the heart of women’s hearts. Once, dining with Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, he asked Farrow how on earth she could be attracted to both Woody and Frank Sinatra.
And there was the time he sent the Times music critic Harold Schonberg over to ask the irascible Wanda Horowitz what it was like to have two demanding musical geniuses in her life — her father, Arturo Toscanini, and her husband, Vladimir Horowitz.
“They ruined my life and they should roast in hell!” she shrieked.
Arthur never tired of telling how he discovered Barbra Streisand in the Village and fell in love with 19-year-old Barbara Stone the day the comely redhead started working with him on the Times copy desk.
As a young theater reporter, he was always getting bewitched by beautiful actresses.
One morning in 1951, he went to a small midtown hotel to interview “a new personality” handpicked by Colette to star in “Gigi” on Broadway.
“She opened the door and she was in her bathrobe,” he told me, “and she looked a little disheveled, and that was very exciting, and I found my heart pounding a little bit because she was so pretty close up. And she was so intelligent and she had humor and a kind of come-hither way when she talked to a man.”
He peppered her with so many questions, she told him they should finish up over dinner at the Plaza.
When he called Barbara to tell her he had to work late interviewing Audrey Hepburn, his irritated bride replied, “You call that work?”
My favorite story, which I made Arthur retell on a BBC radio show a couple years ago, was his “drunken prank” on Marilyn Monroe.
One night in the early 1950s when he was about 30 and was working on night rewrite, he and his fellow rewrite guys took their 10 o’clock dinner break at Sardi’s. Monroe came in with a group and was seated at the next table.
Her dress had a low-cut back, and Arthur said he and his pals were “mesmerized by her back” and her “absolutely flawless skin, very white, very pure.”
“One of us said, ‘You know, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to just touch that back?’ And before we knew it, we were talking about who would have the guts, the nerve, the bravery to touch her. We all put up a couple of dollars and said the first person who leans over and touches her will collect the money. And I, with bravado — I was kind of a wise-guy young man — leaned over quickly and just touched her with my forefinger.
“I thought I’d touch her and maybe she wouldn’t even feel the touch. But she swung around and said in the loudest voice imaginable: ‘Who did that?’ And we just went into our clothes to hide. It was just the most horrible moment you could possibly imagine. And her friends said, ‘Come on, Marilyn,’ and they calmed her down and turned her around. I collected the 10 bucks and we got out of there.”
Some like it hot. Arthur liked it crackling.
Next up we have The Moustache of Wisdom:
Of the many things being said about climate change lately, none was more eloquent than the point made by Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State in the Showtime series “Years of Living Dangerously,” when he observed: “We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.”
The question is how do we motivate people to do something about it at the scale required, when many remain skeptical or preoccupied with the demands of daily life — and when climate scientists themselves caution that it is impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, even if recent weather extremes fit their models of exactly how things will play out as the planet warms.
Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog last week linked to a very novel approach offered by Thomas Wells, a Dutch philosopher: Since climate change and environmental degradation pit the present against the future, our generation versus those unborn, we should start by giving the future a voice in our present politics.
“Even if we can’t know what future citizens will actually value and believe in, we can still consider their interests, on the reasonable assumption that they will somewhat resemble our own (everybody needs breathable air, for example),” wrote Wells in Aeon Magazine. Since “our ethical values point one way, towards intergenerational responsibility, but our political system points another, towards the short-term horizon of the next election,” we “should consider introducing agents who can vote in a far-seeing and impartial way.”
Wells suggests creating a public “trusteeship” of nongovernmental civic and charitable foundations, environmental groups and nonpartisan think tanks “and give them each equal shares of a block of votes adding up to, say, 10 percent of the electorate,” so they can represent issues like “de-carbonizing the economy” and “guaranteeing pension entitlements” for the unborn generation that will be deeply impacted but has no vote.
Unrealistic, I know, but the need to incorporate longer time scales into our societal choices is very real — and right in the lap of our generation. Andy Revkin, who blogs at Dot Earth for The Times’s Opinion section, put it well: “We are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite. So how we manage infinite aspirations of a species that’s been on this explosive trajectory, not just of population growth but of consumptive appetite — how can we make a transition to a stabilized and still prosperous relationship with the Earth and each other — is the story of our time.”
One way to get us to act with an intergenerational perspective is to enlarge the problem beyond climate — to make people understand that this is our generation’s freedom struggle. The abiding strategy of our parents’ generation was “containment” of communism in order to be free. The abiding strategy of our generation has to be “resilience.” We will only be free to live the lives we want if we make our cities, country and planet more resilient.
Even if we can’t attribute any particular storm to climate change, by continually pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we are “loading the dice” in ways that climate scientists are convinced will continue to raise average temperatures, melt more ice, raise sea levels, warm oceans and make “normal” droughts drier, heat waves hotter, rainstorms more violent and the most disruptive storms even more disruptive. It is crazy to keep loading those dice and making ourselves more vulnerable to disruptions that will make us less free to live the lives we want. How free will we be when paying the exorbitant cleanup costs of endless weather extremes?
Moreover, acting today as if climate change requires an urgent response — like replacing income and corporate taxes with a carbon tax, introducing a national renewable portfolio standard to constantly stimulate more renewable energy and raising the efficiency standards for every home, building and vehicle — actually makes us healthier, more prosperous and more resilient, even if climate change turns out to be overblown. We would end up with cleaner air and a tax structure that rewards more of what we want (work and investment) and disincentivizes what we don’t want (carbon pollution). We would be taking money away from the worst enemies of freedom on the planet, the world’s petro-dictators; and we would be incentivizing our industries to take the lead in manufacturing clean air, water and power systems, which will be in huge demand on a planet going from 7 billion to 9 billion people by 2050.
In short, by taking the climate threat seriously now, we’d make ourselves so much more economically, physically, environmentally and geopolitically resilient — and, therefore, more free.
What containment was for our parents’ generation — their strategy to fight for freedom against the biggest threat of their day — resiliency will be for our generation against the multiple threats of our day: climate change, petro-dictatorship and destruction of our environment and biodiversity. Let’s act so the next generation will want to honor us with a Memorial Day, the way we honor the sacrifice of previous generations.
And now we get to Mr. Kristof, writing from Long An, Vietnam:
Tay Thi Nguyen is one of the mightiest people I’ve met, at 94 pounds. She has a towering presence, at a bit more than 5 feet tall. She is so strong that she probably could bench press 25 pounds.
Three times Tay Thi has fainted while here at college, training to become an English teacher, because she starved herself to afford tuition. But she had the strength to persist and soon will become the first person in her village to graduate from college, and she embodies such grit and selflessness that, to me, she’s the world’s college graduate of the year.
Tay Thi, 20, also underscores the principle — especially important in the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls — that the best leverage we have to achieve social change is to educate girls.
The eighth of nine children to an impoverished farming family in the Mekong Delta, Tay Thi shone in school, but her mother demanded — unsuccessfully — that she drop out after primary school and earn money as a live-in housemaid in distant Ho Chi Minh City.
“She got very angry with me,” Tay Thi recalled. In eighth grade, her mom burned her school books to try to force her to drop out, but Tay Thi borrowed books and continued to excel.
Staying in school was possible because of the help she received from Room to Read, an aid group that sponsored Tay Thi and covered her school fees, uniform, books, bicycle to get to school and other expenses.
Tay Thi persevered, even when her parents again burned her books in 12th grade, and, as she graduated from high school, she prepared secretly for the college entrance examination. Her mother found out about this when Tay Thi left to take the exam and lashed out, saying “I hope you fail the exams.”
Other students arrived at the exam location escorted by cheering, doting parents; Tay Thi arrived alone, sobbing. Still, she aced the exam.
With no parental subsidy, college seemed unaffordable, but Tay Thi saved every penny she could. She had long worked every vacation — sometimes in a factory job by day and in a duck soup restaurant by night until 2 a.m. Even during Vietnamese New Year celebrations, she worked in the fields by herself to catch crabs for money — watching the fireworks in the distance.
At college, Tay Thi confined herself to a food budget of $3.50 — per week. Malnourished, she sometimes toppled over in the middle of class in a dead faint.
Professors and students discovered that she was starved and basically penniless — leaving Tay Thi feeling humiliated. “I was so upset about that,” she said, but, in retrospect, it was a turning point because her teachers and classmates responded with kindness, sympathy and help.
Room to Read arranged a corporate scholarship, which gave her a bit more spending money, and Tay Thi managed to eat enough to keep from fainting in public.
Tay Thi shares a small room with two other young women, all sleeping on the floor next to each other. She set up a small reading light that won’t keep the others awake. She studies until midnight, and then sets her alarm for 4 a.m. to resume studying.
She is just as passionate about education for others. First, she encouraged her older brother to return to school, after years of working as a laborer, so he could become a mechanic. When he resisted, Tay Thi went out and registered him as a student, picking his courses and browbeating him until he gave in.
Then she coaxed her younger brother to follow her to college, where he is now a freshman. Even her parents have come around, partly because they see that Tay Thi will soon be an English teacher — and the best-paid member of the extended family.
Tay Thi is trying to arrange to teach in her own remote village school, where she wants to advocate for education. “I would like to change people’s thinking,” she says. “It’s a way of helping children in my community,” she said.
The kidnappings in Nigeria have put a spotlight on girls’ education, and Tay Thi is an example of why the issue is critical. It’s sometimes said that if you send a boy to school, you educate a man; if you send a girl to school, you educate a village. That’s not always true, but empowering girls remains one of the best ways to empower a community. Girls’ education also strongly correlates to reduced family size. When I asked Tay Thi if she planned to have nine children like her mom, she roared with laughter and gave a firm “NO!”
So let’s celebrate the mightiest college graduate of this commencement season, a young woman of incomparable strength who now is thrilled at the prospect of returning to an impoverished farming village to teach children and change the world.
Last but not least we get to Mr. Bruni:
A kiss is nothing. On the sidewalks, in the park, I see one every few minutes, a real kiss, lip to lip. It barely registers. It’s as unremarkable as a car horn in traffic, as an umbrella in rain.
And yet a kiss is everything. A kiss can stop the world.
The football player Michael Sam recently demonstrated as much. So did my experience last Sunday, in a Broadway theater, of all places.
I say “of all places” because a theater is a progressive environment, and this theater, on this night, was especially so. In the audience were many people who’d participated hours earlier in the city’s annual AIDS Walk, to which the performance was linked. And the performance was of “Mothers and Sons,” a Tony-nominated play about gay shame, gay pride and our steady march toward a less censorious society.
So it wasn’t surprising, or shouldn’t have been, when the woman in the seat beside mine stood to greet the woman who was belatedly joining her with a kiss, on the mouth, that lasted long enough to be unmistakably romantic.
“Did you catch that?” said my own companion.
I most definitely had. And while neither of us was scandalized, we were jolted nonetheless. We marveled — even in the middle of 2014, even on the cusp of a week in which Oregon and Pennsylvania joined the rapidly growing list of states to legalize same-sex marriage — that the couple could do this and would do this in front of so many witnesses, in a setting so public. Others around us had also taken note, their eyes lingering on the two women for a while.
Maybe marriage isn’t the dividing line between equality and inequality, between getting full, reflexive acceptance from the world and getting a piecemeal, willed respect. Maybe that border is traced with kisses: with what Sam did and how those women said hello and the kind of reaction it elicits and whether it elicits any reaction at all.
There’s a rich history of the kiss as frontier. I was reminded of this a few days after the show, as I delved deeper into an excellent book that I happened to be reading, “Pictures at a Revolution.” Written by the journalist Mark Harris, it examines the changes convulsing Hollywood in the 1960s. Chunks of it focus on the trailblazing career of Sidney Poitier, and there were kisses on that trail, beginning with one in “A Patch of Blue,” a 1965 movie about a black man’s friendship, blooming into love, with a young white woman.
The woman is blind, and it’s a measure of Hollywood’s heavy-handedness at the time that she can’t see the object of her affection: Racism is expunged only when skin color is literally erased. What’s more, Poitier’s character isn’t the agent of the kiss, which Harris identifies as the first of its kind in a big mainstream movie. The white woman initiates it, and it stuns him.
Even so, these fleeting seconds of “A Patch of Blue” were cut from the prints of the movie distributed in the South, Harris writes. This was two years before Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down the laws in many Southern states that banned interracial marriage.
In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” released six months after Loving v. Virginia, Poitier again kisses a white woman. And it’s again presented in a manner that suggests its audacity — as a shadowy clutch in the rearview mirror of a taxicab whose driver isn’t prepared for it.
In a famous episode of the television sitcom “All in the Family” in 1972, the black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., playing himself, defiantly plants a kiss on the cheek of the white bigot Archie Bunker, who is visibly aghast. The kiss is the great equalizer, collapsing the distance between two people, leveling their altitudes. It makes them one and it makes them the same.
A kiss speaks volumes, even when it doesn’t say precisely that. As Maureen Dowd noted in a 1984 story in The Times about Geraldine Ferraro’s historic selection as Walter Mondale’s running mate, Mondale was strenuously advised not to kiss her, lest he seem to treat her with less dignity and ceremony than he would a man. Sixteen years later, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000, it was a kiss — an exuberant, extravagant, somebody-please-get-them-a-room kiss — with which Al Gore communicated his passion for Tipper and his passion, period, to an electorate that needed to see it.
In 1993, as a commentary on longstanding tensions between Jews and African-Americans in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, The New Yorker ran a cover illustration by Art Spiegelman of a white Hasidic man enfolding a black woman in a kiss. Many people were shocked.
Now it’s the gay kisses we’re all aflutter about. They’ve been a long time coming. Sandra Bernhard, who played a lesbian on the sitcom “Roseanne” in the 1990s, remembers hearing a director yell “Cut!” as she and the actress Morgan Fairchild stood facing each other under mistletoe and leaned in. “The censors would not let us finish that kiss,” Bernhard told me.
In a subsequent episode, there was indeed a woman-to-woman kiss, though not involving her. But across eight seasons of “Will & Grace,” there were just three man-to-man kisses, according to Max Mutchnick, one of the show’s creators, and the paucity of kisses in “Modern Family” has been a sustained curiosity.
Gay characters who trade sass and sexual innuendo are safe. Public expressions of gay intimacy aren’t.
And they’re still rare enough that the initial, internal reaction that I and many other gay people had to the way Sam clutched and kissed his boyfriend on national TV wasn’t exultation. It was alarm. Had he gone too far? Asked too much?
“We reflexively feel in our core that someone’s going to get punched, and that’s why we wince,” said Mutchnick, 48, noting that he and I and so many gay people spent our youths and maybe portions of our adult lives walking on eggshells, speaking in whispers.
Those eggshells cling. I still sometimes feel panic when my partner, meeting me in a restaurant, gives me a perfunctory kiss on the lips. And yet I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that.
We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was something to hold on to.
