Bill Maher: Tea Partiers ‘Nostalgic For An Era When Blacks Were Invisible’

Is the national conversation about Tea Partiers currently trending toward a conversation about racism? Last week’s big NYT/CBS poll that revealed Tea Partiers to be older, mostly white, and well-educated looks to have turned a lot of the media’s assumptions about the movement on their head…at least the well-educated part. During a panel on his show the other night Bill Maher concluded that well-educated did not necessarily mean well-informed. “Not ignorant but plainly misinformed. Stubbornly misinformed. They have named themselves after a tax revolt and they have no idea what’s going on with taxes.”

Meanwhile, Maher’s guests, which included New Yorker editor David Remnick and journalist Laura Flanders, appeared to concur with Frank Rich’s take on what’s motivating the movement, concluding from the poll results that the Partiers are actually not that upset about government involvement or taxing (they like their medicare; social security), but are worried and angry that we have a black president.

Says Flanders: “All this time we’ve

been told to believe that they were beleaguered poor white people worried about taxes, now we come to find out they’re actually quite well-to-do white people, worried about a black president.”

Says Remnick: What concerns me is the phrase ‘Take Back Our Country.’ When I hear the phrase ‘we want our country back’ I’m afraid that’s coded language.

Counters Maher: Let’s not say they’re racist, let’s say they’re nostalgic for an era where blacks were invisible.

Remick does point out that it’s not fair to paint the Tea Party as a whole as racist, or ignorant of the issues, but that the worst aspects of the party are represented by its leaders, namely Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Bachmann. As pointed out by Norah O’Donnell during a Chris Matthews appearance yesterday, Palin starts all of her appearances by asking the crowd to help her ‘take back our country.’ And regular watchers of Glenn Beck will know that he spends a not little amount of time glorifying the old days when things were right in America (frequently with the help of a 1950’s TV set). Video of the exchange below. The Tea Party language conversation begins about the 1:30 mark.