My job deprives me of the luxury of partisanship, as I have to reach out to both sides on the issue of free trade -- a disastrous policy one can give impeccably liberal
or conservative reasons to be against. So I can't offer any opinion of the Tea Party movement
per se. But I can tell you that the way they're handling the issue of free trade reveals a lot about them.
Over the last year, I've interacted with the Tea Party about the issue at both the local level and with some of their leadership. And I've observed a few things.
The main thing is just how utterly conflicted they are, in two very different ways.
The first way is simply that the base of the Tea Party has views of free trade very different from its Washington leadership, and very different from the Republicans they've elected to Congress. (In this respect, the Tea Party's base is not all that different from a lot of disappointed liberals who
voted for Obama).
Polls show that 61% of the grass roots of the Tea Party think free trade agreements have been bad for the country. (This is not a perfect proxy for free trade
per se, but it's close enough to make the point, especially when these agreements are the flashpoints of the issue.) But there's no sign of such skepticism in their leadership, which seems to think that it's leading the Ayn Rand Party, not the Tea Party. The leadership is utterly gung-ho for new
free trade agreements with Korea and now Panama and Colombia.
More importantly, the Tea Party's grass roots are themselves conflicted -- between what they
believe, and what they
want.