What can unite liberals and tea-partyers? The NSA

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Hoyt Sparks says he has no use for liberal Democrats and their “socialistic, Marxist, communist” ways.

Toni Lewis suspects tea- party Republicans are “a bunch of people who probably need some mental-health treatment.”

Politically speaking, the tea-party supporter in rural North Carolina and the Massachusetts liberal live a world apart.

Who or what could get them thinking the same?

Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.

By exposing the NSA’s vast surveillance web, Snowden created a link between tea- partyers and liberals — two tribes camped on opposite sides of the nation’s political chasm.

These people to the right and left of mainstream America sound a lot alike now.

Sparks, a federal retiree in the Blue Ridge mountain town of Sparta and a political independent, condemns the NSA programs as “a breach of privacy which violates the Constitution.”

Lifetime Democrat Lewis, a social worker in the city of Brockton, near Boston, says, “When we’re violating the rights of U.S. citizens, I think that’s a dangerous line to be walking.”

Whether they are Republicans, Democrats or independents, almost half of Americans say they support the tea-party movement or call themselves liberal.

Compared with their more-moderate Republican or Democratic peers, tea partyers and liberals are significantly more likely to oppose the collection of millions of ordinary citizens’ telephone and Internet data, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows.

By a 2-to-1 margin, these two groups say the government should put protecting citizens’ rights and freedoms ahead of protecting them from terrorists.

Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans support the tea-party movement. Nearly 4 in 10 Democrats call themselves liberals. Combined, they are buoying a coalition of conservative and liberal lawmakers pushing to rein in the NSA, while party leaders balk at anything that might weaken the agency’s ability to foil terrorists.

Why does the NSA unite the right and left ends of the political spectrum?

“More extreme political views lead to more distrust of government,” said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who’s studied the tea party’s focus on the Constitution.

People at the far ends of the political spectrum are less likely than middle-of-the-road voters to feel government is responsive to them.

On the flip side, Somin said, moderates generally don’t follow politics as closely as people at the extremes, so they may be less aware of the scope of the NSA’s activities.