Strong moral streak is key to understanding tea party

Sharron Angle's Senate primary victory Tuesday in Nevada was the latest in a string of high-profile tea party movement victories. Last week, the insurgency also helped Nikki Haley finish first in South Carolina's GOP gubernatorial primary.

Tea party voters helped Rand Paul defeat an establishment GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky last month, drove Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter out of GOP primary races, and sank the re-election bid of Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett.

According to a Harris poll in late May, the tea party movement is growing in prominence. About 85 percent of Americans have heard of it, and almost 40 percent of Americans say they support it.

Yet, the movement remains little understood by much of the media. Stories tend to focus on the movement's most colorful characters — the folks who dress up in Revolutionary-era garb, the Second Amendment advocates who go to rallies toting guns, and the birthers who insist that President Barack Obama is the tool of international socialist forces. To readers, the message often is: These folks are weird.

Media coverage frequently paints the tea party movement as a novel and contemptible political phenomenon. Michael Kinsley of the Atlantic Monthly offers the epitome of this perspective. He says tea partyers "sprang from nowhere," and unlike the "selfless and idealistic" 1960s hippies, they are "nasty" and ultimately "self-interested." Mark Lilla, a Columbia University political philosopher, wrote a more thoughtful assessment in the New York Review of Books. But, he came to a similar conclusion. The tea partyer is a "new type" of American, "the anti-political Jacobin," who exhibits "blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing — and unwarranted — confidence in the self."

Weird, radically antigovernment, new and selfish — it is not a pretty picture. But is it accurate? I do not think so.

What evidence that exists shows that the tea party movement is not a bunch of weirdos with uniformly far-out views. According to an April New York Times/CBS poll, most tea partyers identify themselves as married, middle- or working-class churchgoers. The vast majority have full-time jobs or are retired. It is true that nearly all tea partyers say they want a smaller federal government. Yet, a majority of those polled also believe Social Security and Medicare are worthwhile programs.