After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment - with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon - is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.
The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded in the 1960s and 1970s by William F. Buckley Jr.
“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in the Washington Post . “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”
But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal – to deprive Democrats and their allies a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.
“I don’t believe we should be giving (extremists) a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, “because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy.”
The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “ because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”
Until recently, organizers and activists mostly seemed content to ignore, or in some cases tolerate, extremists in their ranks, confident they’d be drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of activists who took to congressional town halls and marches around the country to protest big-spending initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.
But inflammatory rhetoric such as former congressman Tom Tancredo’s racially tinged speech at this month’s tea party convention, reports of the involvement of right wing militia groups, and the continued propagation of conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama have sometimes cast the movement in an unfavorable light.
Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists, and this month banned birthers – conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be President – from his blog (he has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks – a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum).
“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.
Ryun’s American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists and others around the country, has done much the same thing. Its website has moved to close its sessions to activists who identify themselves with the birther, truther or militia movements, or the John Birch Society.
