They Are To Be Pitied. And Mocked, Don't Forget Mocked.

Nate Silver is currently estimating the total number of teabaggers on Wednesday at somewhere over 300,000 people.  Ezra is a bit impressed by this, saying

My sense of the Tea Parties is that they were really about the conservative opposition standing up and defining itself as such. That's a strange transition to make after eight years of power and this seemed like an almost ritualized method of accepting it.

This is, I think, more of what conservative media and interest groups are trying to sell than actual reality.  The problem is that 300,000 can sound like a lot, and we can be sure that Nate's estimate will be much lower than those proffered by the teabaggers themselves. 

So let's have some context, shall we:

• 1,800,000 Americans think the moon landing was faked.
• 54,000,000 Americans think the sun revolves around the earth.
• From the same poll, 72,000,000 Americans think that the US won its independence from France or another country, or had no answer at all.
• Back in 2002, 21,000,000 Americans still believed that Elvis is alive.

America has 300,000,000 people in it.  The 300,000 people who may have attended these silly teabaggings represent 1/10 of 1 percent of the American population.  Pick any belief, any activity, no matter how far-fetched, how exotic or fringe it may be, and you'll be able to find more than 300,000 people who subscribe to it.  Since protests are a regular occurrence every single April 15th, and since these top-down organized events had more than their fair share of politicians and paid staffers from conservative organizations, the number of people who can be described as newly outraged at their government's profligacy with their taxes is an even more pathetic number.

These teabaggings were not the moment that the conservative movement found its message or unifying cause.  They were not the point at which opposition to Obama finally coalesced into a real movement.  Instead, they were just another failed attempt by out-of-touch consultants and other corporate types to manufacture a grassroots movement.  If all they can manage is a little over 300,000 people - a significant portion of whom were going to turn out to protest anyway because that's just what they do on April 15th - then the message here is that the GOP is still completely rudderless, leaderless and without vision of any kind.  Their moneyed interests and consultants still have no clue about what resonates with the overwhelming majority of Americans. 

It does, however, make me look forward to their next stunt.  If this didn't work, after all, they'll have to up the ante and make it even sillier.

Comments

[nimh]

Eh, I don't think that's quite fair. Sure, X million idiots still believe Elvis is alive, but they wouldn't take to the streets to demonstrate their passion about it.

This strikes me as fairly simple, really. If 300,000 people took to the streets to demonstrate in favour of, say, universal health care, would you be enthused? Would you be impressed? If so, you can't really belittle the 300,000 teabaggers for not constituting more than 0,1% of the population. When it comes to street manifestations, especially in America (in comparison with, say, France), 0,1% of the population is not a bad number to mobilise, not in a country that large.

[nimh]

Compare, for example, the demonstrations against the Iraq war. Judging on this Wikipedia page, these were the three biggest days of demonstrations in the US:

• On October 26 [2002], [o]ver 100,000 people took part in a protest in Washington. 50,000 people took part in a demonstration in San Francisco.

• On January 18 [2003], [..] NION and ANSWER jointly organized protests in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Other protests took place all over the United States [..]. In San Francisco, between 150,000 and 200,000 people attended the demonstration. The San Francisco police [..] admitted later that they had badly underestimated the number and changed their estimate to 150,000. [..] In Washington, "at least tens of thousands"[27], or "several hundred thousand"[28] people demonstrated through the city [..].

• [On Mrch 22-23, 2003,] 250,000 protesters demonstrated in New York City according to the German Spiegel Online magazine. There were protests in Washington, D.C ,[in] Chicago, [and] CNN reported that a march of over a thousand protesters in Atlanta, Georgia passed by their headquarters [..].

Since national tallies are missing here, it's impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but the way I read these numbers it seems that the Iraq protests were obviously bigger than the teabag thing, but not by all that much - twice as big, maybe. And that was only on the three top days, many other national days of protest drew much fewer numbers. And yet I'm sure that, like me, you were impressed and enthused by the numbers on the street.

I'm the last person to defend the foolishnesses uttered by the teabaggers or the cynicism of the forces that edge them on - the top letter here says what I think pretty well. I just dont want to end up using double standards. If I'd be impressed by 300,000 leftists on the street (and I would), then I can't belittle 300,000 rightwingers on the street, not on the basis of their number, anyway.

[Stephen]

I can't remember the source, but IIRC there were about 10,000,000 US protestors against the Iraq War. A bit of a difference in size. And the recent immigrant rallies were way bigger than even the anti-Iraq war protests.

And though I haven't been able to find estimates, it simply cannot be discounted that these tea parties glommed onto regularly occurring tax day protests. A fair number of the people who participated would have been there without any Lipton products.

Would I be impressed if 300,000 liberals rallied for universal health care? Maybe. But that's apples to oranges, since universal healthcare, while important, is not supposed to be a real hot-button issue for liberals.

Now, if there was a concerted, well-funded campaign to put together rallies against torture, a war, against the death penalty or other issues that are much more central to liberal beliefs in this country and we only got 300,000, I wouldn't be impressed at all. I'd be disappointed and demoralized.

[nimh]

10,000,000 US protestors against the Iraq War

In the US? There's certainly nothing in the comprehensive-seeming list on Wikipedia that comes anywhere near such a number. Maybe if you add the participants of all the different days of demonstrations up together...

[riffle]

Fox news aired scores of advertisements for these events (Jed Lewisohn estimates the value of the ads would be about $500,000 -- close to two dollars per participant).

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/17/721376/-Fox-donated-at-least-half-million-dollars-in-free-teabagging-ads

In addition to the advertisements, Fox and Fox Business talked it up on air during their programs, as did Clear channel and wingnut radio outlets.

Fox guaranteed television coverage in quite a few areas: as we know from reality tv, people will do a lot just to get their image on the box.

The presence of name-brand fox celebrities (Beck, Cavuto, van Susteren, et al) at various venues doubtlessly boosted numbers at those venues and possibly at others when people may have presumed a minor Fox star would appear.

All above points to the fact that this was a big crowd of primarily Fox fans.

Finally, there's a steady state of anti-tax protests every April 15, so I'm not sure how much the Fox push added to that, though it undoubtedly did quite a bit.

I'm not seeing this as a broad-based movement, but instead a solely media-generated event mainly by one media outlet. It could become more in years to come...or not.

[riffle]

Oh, one more thing that Fox did to support these events: they offered up server space and web pages with locations and times of events all around the country, then repeatedly broadcast the URL for these pages on their cablecasts.

A lot of "grassroots" events would be immeasurably boosted by having a national media organization repeatedly telling viewers how to find information about "events in your area!" and having web pointers to info about those events.

I'm not pointing out merely that these were FNC driven events, but cataloguing some of the PR and advertising that was donated by Fox to these events. I doubt there's any other partisan but non-election event in the history of the nation that's had so much PR and advertising from a "news" outlet.

I thought they'd get about a million or so, based on the incredibly hard-sell pimping they did and scattering their cameras and celebrities around the nation.

[Sir Charles]

I've been in at least a couple of protests in DC alone where we had far in excess of 300,000 people. On Solidarity Day on August 31, 1991, labor and its supporters mustered about 500,000 on the mall here. The March for Women's Lives in 2004 drew more than 750,000 people here.

The idea that assembling 300,000 people scattered across every hamlet in America is impressive seems incredibly weak to me.

[nimh]

if there was a concerted, well-funded campaign to put together rallies against torture, a war, against the death penalty or other issues that are much more central to liberal beliefs in this country and we only got 300,000, I wouldn't be impressed at all.

300,000 at rallies against torture and the death penalty? I'd be much impressed. The war maybe, not so much, though anti-Iraq or -Afghanistan war protests havent actually drawn many people anymore in years.

I dunno. I don't dispute that the whole event has been driven and pushed on by Fox and by various conservative power players. No need to persuade me on that, that's all right there in the letter I linked to, which I said voiced my opinions. And the whole argument these tea partiers are making, in as far as there is a coherent argument, seems profoundly silly and ahistorical to me.

But ridiculing a day of protest involving 300,000 on the basis that it's just 0,1% of the population, really? Sir Charles, if some conservative blogger had written a scathing post about that labor march, deriding the turnout and claiming that the demonstrators weren't representative of anyone because they made up just 0.15% of the population, would you not have considered that a pretty lame argument?

I guess I just don't like "my side" using arguments that I would deem lame if the other side used them, that's pretty much all, really. It's a beef about the argument, obviously not about the underlying politics.

[dm]

Feh, don't dismiss them. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Though I did enjoy Jon Stewart's comment about how they've adopted all those things they used to hate about demonstrations by the left (except the puppets, no giant puppets, as far as I know).

They see the economy and government spiraling out of control --- yes, Bush ran up big deficits, but he was pretty sneaky about it until last Fall, when he and Henry Paulson seemed to add $700 billion in one day. Obama is adding yet more (and, of course, contrary to recent history, these people think Democrats are profligate with public funds). We trust Obama to get it right (as polls indicate most Americans do), they don't (until Paulson's bail-out, they trusted Bush, and many of them --- amazing thought --- would have trusted McCain).

I think there's a ton of naivete among the tea-baggers, a complete lack of thinking things through, and a lot of jerked knees --- about where we've been from time to time. Plus some stupidity or at least misinformation --- I heard one teabagger shouting "Cut taxes, not defense!"

It really will depend on where the economy is eighteen months from now. If things continue to deteriorate precipitously, then the teabaggers will be joined by others. If the economy stabilizes, I suspect the ill-will toward Bush and the good-will that Obama has accumulated will carry us and him through.

[joel hanes]

I'm glad the teabaggers peaceably assembled. It was good training for them to consciously exercise their Constitutional right to speak their minds (such as they are) unhindered.

[Toast]

Believing that Elvis is still alive is actually a somewhat more rational position than believing that Americans are over-taxed.

[NealB]

I enjoyed all the teabagging humor on cable news networks. David Schuster won that competition I think with his piece week before last when he was covering for Olberman, but Anderson Cooper's jibe on speaking when their mouths were full was funny because I've had the sense for a long time that he's got that great sense of humor but he censors himself since he got the anchor job two years ago. Still...

...am I the only one who thought that two full weeks of non-stop tea party stories on cable news was making too much of a not-very-big story?

[Stephen]

am I the only one who thought that two full weeks of non-stop tea party stories on cable news was making too much of a not-very-big story?

No, you're not the only one. Fox News hurt themselves with this one, I think, by abandoning all pretense of "reporting" a story - even with their well-known bias - and blatantly attempting to make a story out of whole cloth. If it had resulted in big demonstrations that would be one thing. But it fizzled, and now that it's done they'll toss it aside like every other failed strategy of the last few years.