Opinion

TEA PARTIES: REAL GRASSROOTS

A kind of energy our politics hasn’t seen lately.

AROUND America, taxpayers have had enough. Fed up with excessive spending, planned tax increases and a federal government that first caused the financial bubble through misregulation, and then grabbed power in order to “fix” it, they’re hitting the streets to protest.

The first march came in Seattle, where a couple of mom-bloggers organized a rally on Feb. 16. Rallies followed in Denver and Mesa, Ariz., on the 17th. Then CNBC talker Rick Santelli delivered his “rant heard ’round the world,” calling for a “tea party” protest in Chicago on July 4. The name stuck, and further Tea Parties began popping up around the nation.

Some — like those in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Orlando and Fullerton, Calif. — drew thousands; others, more modest, saw hundreds. But new rallies popped up every week.

Then organizers — really, just people discussing things on Twitter, blogs and chatboards — decided that Tax Day, April 15, would be the perfect day for a coordinated national day of protest. Online lists of protests (such as taxdayteaparty.com) predict 300 to 500 marches on Wednesday all across the country.

Now that the movement looks likely to be big and successful, various established groups (mostly on the right, though a lefty counterpart will march this weekend) are getting involved. But its genesis and enthusiasm are pure grassroots: a lot of people who’ve had enough, brought together by the power of the Web.

No doubt they’ll be dismissed by chin-pullers in the Big Media (the same folks who sent more reporters than there were protesters to a staged ACORN protest over AIG bonuses), but these Tea Party protests aren’t the same old rituals with the same old marchers.

These aren’t the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn’t seen lately, and an influx of new activists.

Many in the punditocracy will ignore this week’s protests, to the extent possible, this week. But, thanks to alternative media and talk radio, they’ll still get noticed — in particular, by the members of Congress in whose districts they take place.

In the short run, this is likely to provide at least a bit of resistance to the borrow-and-spend-like-there’s-no-tomorrow approach that now governs Washington. In the longer run, they’re likely to be a source of new energy and enthusiasm in politics — bringing in a lot of voters, organizers and even candidates from among those who were previously on the sidelines.

Instead of the “astroturf” that has marked the ACORN-organized AIG protests, this movement is real grassroots. So if you’ve had enough, consider visiting a Tea Party protest in your area — there’s bound to be one.

It’s your chance to be part of an authentic popular protest movement, one that just might save America from the greed and ineptitude of the folks who have been running it into the ground.

Glenn H. Reynolds blogs at InstaPundit.com. He’ll be covering the Tea Party protests on Wednesday for PJTV.com.