American “Tea-Party” as Social Drama

American “Tea-Party” as Social Drama

I’ve been reading a good deal of anthropological theory on rituals and “performance” of late, and it occurs to me that the “Tea-Parties” are a classic example of what Victor Turner analyzes as “social drama” in his books Drama, Field, Metaphor and The Anthropology of Performance. In brief:

I define social dramas as units of aharmonic or disharmonic social process, arising in conflict situations. Typically, they have four main phases of public action. These are: (1) Breach of regular norm-governed social relations; (2) Crisis, during which there is a tendency for the breach to widen. Each public crisis has what I now call liminal characteristics since it is a threshold (limen) between more or less stable phases of the social process . . . It takes up its menacing stance in the forum itself, and, as it were, dares the representatives of order to grapple with it; (3) Redressive action ranging from personal advice and informal mediation or arbitration to formal juridical and legal machinery, and, to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimate other modes of resolution, to the performance of public ritual. Redress, too, has its liminal features, for it is "betwixt and between," and, as such, furnishes a distanced replication and critique of the events leading up to and composing the "crisis." This replication may be in the rational idiom of the judicial process, or in the metaphorical and symbolic idiom of a ritual process; (4) The final phase consists either of the reintegration of the disturbed social group, or of the social recognition and legitimation of irreparable schism between the contesting parties.

1. Breach.

For the Tea-Partiers the breach is obvious but unspeakable: their fellow Americans elected a black president. The Onion’s parody of the election results, as so often with satire, laid bare what no one could say:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-finally-shitty-enough-to-make-social-progre,2594/

What underlies much of the remarkable levels of hatred and violent rhetoric that we have seen is the fact that they cannot publicly say why they are so angry. It is still socially permissible to call the current Secretary of State “bitch”—as they did and do—but not to call the President of the United States “nigger,” though some of the signs come very close.

2. Crisis:

The crisis is clear. After eight years of frat-boy government, some of us elected a grown-up. Like frat boys, Bush and the Republican Party got drunk on cheap power, maxed out the credit cards, trashed the place, and fell asleep in their own vomit. Now it’s time for an adult to try and clean the mess up. And you know how everybody hates Daddy when he gives one of his “Do-you-think-I’m-made-of-money-Time-to-grow-up-and-show-some-responsibility” lectures, and then goes around the house turning off lights and closing the refrigerator door.

The Tea-Partiers feel alienated from the rest of the nation. They thought the Party (Grand, Old) would go on forever. The choice of Tea-Party as their brand name is significant. That brings us to:

3. Redressive Action.

The Tea-Partiers enact a ritual of social regeneration. The outline is basically that of Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage (1909): Separation, Liminality, Incorporation (Death, Burial, Resurrection). They separate themselves from the daily world and drive to a place where everyone agrees with them. They enter a liminal space between the real world of politics and their fantasy of a united America, cleansed of discordant elements: blacks, Jews, homos, New York. They enter the Dreamtime, that primordial creative period when all was possible (Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return). The space is ludic, filled with play and elements of carnival. They dress up as generic Founding Fathers (seldom specific ones who might prove recalcitrant), who work as our Charter Myth, in Malinowski’s terms: the story that “conveys, expresses and strengthens the fundamental fact of local unity and of the kinship unity of the group . . . The story of origin literally contains the legal charter of the community.” Hence the fetishization of the Constitution as tiny talismans (though in fact most are touchingly vague as to what it says) and tricorn hats. They drive back home, refreshed from the bonding experience, ready to fight the good fight.

The most interesting feature, of course, has been the dominant group’s recasting of itself as a persecuted minority.

This ritual goes hand in hand with the main Protestant narrative: 1) In the beginning, a perfect savior founded a perfect church. 2) That church slowly lost her way and her purity. 3) Illegitimate powers (Pope/Whore of Babylon) took her over and turned her down the broad road to Hell. 4) But she can be saved by a faithful remnant who will strip off the false teachings and restore her to her original doctrinal purity.

This is also, of course, the narrative of the founding of America: a people fleeing corruption, seeking the freedom to practice their religion, to become a city set on a hill. But we are being punished for our liberal sins by 9/11, Katrina, and other acts of God, while Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, and Pat Robertson are agreed in promising us, on His behalf, His wrath for allowing gay marriage, and other abominations.

4. Reintegration or Schism

In some ways, this ought to be disinterestedly interesting: Margaret Mead attends a Tea Party Rally. But it’s as much fun as a Mayan sacrifice.

The regenerative goal is to “take back our country,” (23,700,000 hits on google) a battle-cry that says the currently elected government of the United States is illegitimate. The liminal space of the Tea Party allows contradiction, Keat’s negative capability: true patriots who hate their country, constitutional originalists who have enshrined a deliberate misreading of the Second Amendment and are very fuzzy on the First and "an establishment of religion."

Hence the paranoia of the right: birthers, claims of “socialism,” “death panels,” comparisons to Hitler, etc. Ostensibly, this “take back” is to occur at the ballot box, but there is a disturbing quality to the rhetoric.

Sarah Palin proudly posts on her web site that she made Fred Shapiro’s Top Ten Political Quotes for 2010 with “Don’t retreat. Instead — reload!”[1] Metaphorical, of course. As were the sniper’s cross hairs on her PAC’s web site. That list also included:

“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. They’re saying: My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?”-Sharron Angle, radio interview in January 2010.

There are calls for “A Second American Revolution” (2,130,000 hits on google) with the language in any case of armed conflict. Men at Tea Parties hold signs saying
“IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY.”[2]

Nor is all just words as Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) can attest; as Christina-Taylor Green (9),  Dorothy Morris (76), John Roll (63), Phyllis Schneck (79), Dorwan Stoddard (76), and Gabriel Zimmerman (30) cannot.

Some rituals apparently still require human sacrifice.

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[1] http://sarahpalininformation.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/palins-dont-retreat-instead-reload-tweet-makes-most-notable-quotes-list/

[2] “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” - Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787. Timothy McVeigh wore a T-shirt with this quote on the day he murdered 168 people.