At first glance, the demographics of the Tea Party seem to confirm all the stereotypes. Texas, noted conservative bastion and perpetual secession candidate, has 91 separate Tea Party organizations. Alabama and Georgia have large numbers of Partiers; so does Florida. Massachusetts, meanwhile, has zero party-affiliated organizations. There are only seventeen people in the state of Rhode Island willing to claim any sort of affiliation with this ideology. And the location of the nascent party’s first-ever convention sounds like a punch line: it’s at OpryLand, in Nashville, Tennessee.

A closer look, however, reveals that while Tea Parties slant heavily towards what Sarah Palin famously referred to as “the real America,” the suburbs and townships outside of our major metropolises, they’re surprisingly spread out – not just the provenance of the famously conservative South, but also taking root in the Midwest (Illinois and Ohio are big), even as far west as California. All of this suggests that perhaps there are, indeed, many citizens who feel their voices are not being heard, and who are eager to get themselves and their views onto the national stage.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party is probably not going to help their cause.

The Party and its affiliates purport to represent the average Joe or Jen, playing off the tension between the so-called “Washington elite” and the rest of the country that took prominence in the 2008 election. While distance between the rulers and the hoi polloi of this country has existed since its founding (see: the election of Andrew Jackson), the issue became especially toxic during the Obama-McCain race, with Palin and her ilk castigating the Democratic camp as latte-swilling liberals out of touch with the rest of America. This trend, picked up by the media, has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of the Tea Party in American consciousness, because its popularity certainly has nothing to do with the intellectual rigor of its presentation or ideas. Which means that ultimately the movement, with its disdain for intellectualism, hodgepodge of ideas, and internal contradictions, is doing a disservice to the people it is supposed to serve. In short, it’s making them look bad, and providing a distraction from the very real disenfranchisement that started the whole thing.

If the Tea Party wishes to be taken seriously, it needs to clean up its act. First step: shedding its allegiance to representatives with a strong voice but without any intellectual credibility. Exhibit A: Michelle Malkin, whose ties to VDare.com (a site that has pushed the idea, among others, that Aborigines have an average IQ of 62 – below the criteria for mental retardation) ought to be enough alone to disqualify her from being listened to, much less featured. The same goes for Palin, the convention’s keynote speaker and a woman who once referred to the protection offered the President by the federal government’s nonexistent Department of Law. Endorsements from these people are not to be sought; they are to be buried, in a closet, behind all of the other skeletons. Without the presence of a reasonable voice who does not feel compelled to rely on hyperbole and hysteria, the impression given is that this is the thought process of the whole party – a fact that does not allow any real ideas the party might have to be taken seriously.

The Tea Party also ought to consider developing a unified ideology. While it does offer a summation of core values, its supporters appear to be all over the map. A survey of existing TP affiliates suggests a broad range of thought, ranging from the overtly religious (“Get church leaders to celebrate the US Constitution”) to the anti-environmentalist (“Saying ‘no’ to this global warming hoax”) to the xenophobic and borderline incoherent (“There are to many greedy credit junkies in is this world that don’t even know they own this country because we were born here”). The featured writing on the site features similar contradictions and logical holes; the frequent references to the Founding Fathers, for instance, conveniently ignores both the ideological debates that raged within the group over the power of government and the fact that many of them believed that the average yokel was too dumb to handle government properly. Other featured writings promote, variously, the idea that extremism tends to arise from the left wing of the political spectrum, the lack of necessity of a third party (thus sort of negating the whole Tea Party concept), and the possibility of health care reform as a Communist initiative – not exactly a unified set of beliefs.

Another major factor that’s hurting the Tea Party’s presentation of its ideas is, well, the presentation of its ideas. There’s a difference between lofty political rhetoric and the speech of the common man, of course, but there’s also a difference between the speech of the common man and that which is present on the Tea Party’s official materials, which tend to be rife with triple exclamation points, egregious grammatical errors, and articles that don’t follow a clear train of thought. Image is not everything, but it makes the ideas presented therein difficult both to follow and to take seriously.

None of this is to say that the under-representation felt, if not the ideology espoused, is not real. Clearly, there is a groundswell of feeling here that is not manufactured. Which, in the end, is what makes the Tea Party such a tragedy. In a country that is, admittedly, dominated by a few news sources, in a country in which the cities tend to get all the attention, and under a liberal administration, those outside of the bubble – the working-class, the conservative, the small-town residents – are already getting short shrift in the mainstream media. (For proof, just look at the New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio; their description of the former borders on satire.)

But until the Tea Party and its libertarian brethren can provide a real set of defensible, intellectually sound ideas – a viable counterpoint to existing policies – no real change can be effected. Which means that the people these parties represent, people who deserve to be taken seriously, will continue to exist out on the fringe until they can find a reasonable and articulate – not hysterical and hyperbolic – voice for their concerns.

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