Don’t take the bait
by Steve Carlson
By now nearly all Americans have heard of the Tea Parties—the series of grassroots demonstrations against big government that have taken place all across the country for about the last year. An issue of some discussion these days in major mass media is the Tea Partiers’ motives. Apologists for the Obama administration have accused participants of what they call racism—apparently imagining that antipathy for the President’s ethnicity is at the root of the Tea Partiers’ efforts.
Making accusations of this sort is an old trick employed by activists on the radical Left. By commenting repeatedly on the real or supposed personal characteristics of their opponents, Leftists divert the public’s attention from the issues and shift it onto people who are talking about them.
It’s a sure sign of political weakness whenever they employ the tactic, for it shows that they cannot convincingly counter the arguments of their opponents. The formula is simple: if you can’t win an argument with your opponents, attack their character, call them names.
In the present case, the Left appears to be attacking the Tea Partiers out of fear that its long-cherished goal of socialized medicine may never be realized. Leftists are well aware that a majority of Americans do not support the medical insurance bill recently approved by an unpopular Congress and signed into law by an increasingly unpopular president. Whatever statements they may make before the microphones, they all know that the voters will register their disapproval come November.
Having run roughshod over the people’s will and facing their wrath, what’s a Leftist to do? Why, slander the opposition, of course. Pretend the opponents of socialized medicine are motivated solely by distaste for the President’s race. Get people to think the Tea Partiers are being irrational and unfair. Above all, get people to think about them—not about what they’re saying.
Unfortunately, the Tea Partiers’ most vocal defenders don’t seem to have recognized this diversionary tactic. They’ve taken the Left’s bait, responding to the slander directly, citing polls describing the demographic characteristics of Tea Party members and insisting that that they’re not “racists.” In so doing, they unwitting help the Left in its effort to divert public attention from the issues (1). Those who sympathize with the Tea Party movement can offer better support by simply ignoring the Left’s race-baiting tactics and staying focused on the outrages of the Obama administration and its allies.
(1)While neo conservatives attack the Left with great frequency, those attacks are always entirely inaccurate. Progressivism is not Marxism, nor is it even a form of socialism; it is not a kinder, gentler way of transforming us into the Soviet States of America. It is a kinder, gentler way of dominating and exploiting the majority of the population. It is capitalism with a human face. Movement conservatives are correct to demonize progressivism, even though they are doing it for completely incorrect reasons. The American welfare state is not an attempt by crypto-marxists to subvert and destroy a non-existent “free market”. It is an attempt by technocratic elites to subvert and destroy genuinely liberatory movements for the sake of what is most definitely not a “free market.”