Coffee Talk

The emergence of the new coffee party movement is another strangely satisfying story of the power of Facebook. It started with a crowded Facebook page and is now forming into an actual movement. Everything changed the day founder Annabel Park posted a bitter status update on her Facebook profile in response to tea party protests around the country that read, “let’s start a coffee party. smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea…let’s get together…have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.” A short time later, Park found a long string of comments on the status, and then she created an actual Facebook group, which now boasts over 100,000 members. Voilá—movement born.

Formed in opposition to the conservative grassroots movement, the tea party, and proposing a difficult to dislike platform of collaboration, cooperation, civility and democracy in action, the coffee party is catching on fast and getting publicity. It even earned itself a very long Washington Post article that revealed vague but popular support. The article suggested that the movement was going to take politics by storm. Now, the coffee party is growing into something more official. It staged its kickoff earlier this month, with “coffee parties,” across the nation. Waves of people are starting chapters across the country.

But an interview via conference call with Park and her boyfriend/work partner/emergency publicist, Eric Byler, the picture of the new movement ended up as one with big ideas but few tangible goals.

Park and Byler, who are documentary filmmakers in their non-coffee party lives, may have accidentally demonstrated that even in a platform of cooperation and civility, conflict may inherently exist. Soon after the interview begins, Park and Byler disagree about the way the interview is actually going. “Annabel, can I say that it might read better if there’s a little bit more back-and-forth between you guys?” Byler interjects.

Park snaps back, “Do you want to direct this or are you going to let me do the interview?" Cooperation and collaboration to make democracy work might be valuable ideas, but with human beings, they can be hard to put into practice.

But even though she starts on uneven footing, Park soon finds her confidence. “What the movement is about is not just about the tea party, but more about people responding to the breakdown in the political process in our federal government," she says. "I think that it really had a lot to do with the degenerating debate—the health care debate that we witnessed this past year.”

What the coffee party picks up on is a tangible sense of frustration: The left is experiencing frustration with the tea party rhetoric and tactics, frustration with government failures to enact sweeping progressive legislation in favor of more limited bills, frustration with media. It amounts to a pure, passionate angst.

This frustration compounded during the health care debate because, as Park says, “It’s almost like we were able to take an X-ray of what’s inside the political process, because we followed it really carefully because it was reported constantly and it went on for so long. And what we found there was kind of just really dysfunctional and there’s a lot of loopholes in our political process that I think people are exploiting.”

The coffee party movement attempts to funnel its adherents’ frustration into a general vision for the future of America. “Right now I’d say our goal is to change the political culture. We’re not trying to create a third party or anything like that. We need to change the way we talk about politics and the way we think about politics. We need to bring more civility to our dialogue. We need to make a certain commitment to going beyond the rhetoric and looking at the facts,” Park says.

Their overall desire is to make democracy work again, to encourage Americans to practice their citizenship and try to come together for consensus. And Park says, without this kind of consensus and citizen involvement “democracy dies. We just have a skeleton. We have a structure but it’s not active.”

“The way I see it," Park continues, "democracy is a process whereby people come together as a community, and they’re all there to advance the common good, and it’s a collective decision-making process … this way of processing political events and political activities has really corrupted the process.” The idea of democracy’s trivialization, corruption, and denigration came up frequently in the interview.

But some accuse the movement of not having enough to rally behind or a strong enough unifying message. Park responds that doubters would have to wait and see. “There’s nothing more unifying in America than our belief in democracy,” she says.

The tea party came out of a similar frustration on the right, but the tea party seems to have a better idea of what their message is, even if it’s a rather simplistic and unrealistic one. They also seem to have a better sense of who their base is and not just how to mobilize it, but also how to make it effective.

The coffee party’s solution seems simply to talk. The plan is actually for groups of neighbors across the country to get together for coffee and discuss issues civilly. They hope in April to have “Coffee with Congress,” during which, members will be “…basically, going into their district office and sitting down with them…and really trying to engage, as opposed to going in to protest. You know, just see them as fellow human beings and just try to have a conversation with them, try to tell your story.” It’s a nice idea, but we have yet to see what it will actually accomplish.

Rebecca Foerg-Spittel is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends the College of Holy Cross.

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