I’m perforce following the antics of the Tea Party movement. This organization couldn’t have snowballed without the Web 2.0 social networking system to enable it. Perot didn’t have any access to such power in 1992. Ron Paul tried, but it hadn’t yet reached critical mass.
This is probably the answer to a question I recently posted as a response on (facepalm) FaceBook:
Where was that Tea Party 7 years ago, after the president declared “Mission Accomplished” in that elective war? That excursion from reality was a significant factor in converting the budget surplus he inherited into record debt. As was his creation of the largest government bureaucracy ever (Homeland Security) nominally to do what other agencies were already supposed to be doing. Then his decision to roll back those pesky banking regulations established in the 1930’s to prevent lenders from packaging bad debts as good bets, sure has worked out well.
But now there is a coordinated effort to undermine the legacy political process by uniting people of disparate intentions under a single banner. Anarchists, Libertarians, Christian-nationists, assault-rifles-for-the-kids, and anti-taxers now gather together in front of cameras from every corner of the nation. Who is the current figurehead of the movement? Sarah Palin.
Not that Ron Paul is yet out of the running. But certain faith-based reports count him out of Tea Party support.
Maybe I’m just confused, but I’d really like to see an actual Tea Party party in the next big election. This would be a true referendum on how much support they have.
But as near as I can tell from my casual reading, the Tea Party goal is not to take responsibility, but rather to sink candidates from the other parties who disagree with their very particular simple positions on complex issues.
It would be nice to see the boneheaded wing of the G.O.P. move completely into a Tea Party, so they could be effectively recognized and isolated. I've seen movements by some members of the G.O.P. to try to take the party back from the loons, but lunacy on such a scale is a vote catcher and media bonanza. The Tea Party could be the new Know Nothings.
Dan: Had you seen this "Best Of" fake Tea Party signs from Boston Commons? http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-best-fake-teab…
One must remember Poe's Law here. There is an actual movement to crash the Tea Party.
So now the Tea Party can claim that the most outrageous things they are caught saying or doing are really the result of infiltrators, not legitimate "Patriots".
And the Tea Party movement does appear completely innocent… of knowledge of what the original Tea Party was about:
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And now, the media notice disunity in the Tea Party: Tea Party: A House Divided (link to a new DI post)
Would an office Tea Party party have any electoral success? From what I've seen, no way. Half (or probably more) of the party's faux constituents are Republicans to the core, who have simply latched onto the movement in the attempt to bolster the GOP they love.
I went to a Tea Party protest in Columbus a few months ago. It was a fairly big to-do, with a few B-list Fox reporters and Ron Paul himself. Most of the time was devoted to local, Ohio Republican infighting however. On a panel of local politicians there was a vicious split: half wanted the movement to "focus" on the Republican party and reform it from within, while the other half wanted big, sweeping "real" changes that entailed the formation of a new party.
These two camps are widely different in ideology and intent, as several recent posts here at DI well attest. The energetic 'heart' of this movement, if there is one, comes from a small and impassioned group of kinda-sorta kooky libertarians. But the numbers and the publicity derive from a large, oafish collective of paranoid and ignorant Republicans, who do not truly seek 'revolutionary' reform. The passionate nougaty center of this movement will shake and rant and organize, energized by their apparent swell in support, but they will never get anywhere, because those masses of supporters aren't informed or sincere.
At least an election with a real Tea Party party would help the tea party libertarians realize this. Then maybe they'd drop out and stop flaming the fires of the Republican base. Ho hum.