This straight-forward list packs a wallop, in my opinion. It seems like that Tea-party advocates aren’t really mad about “government” and they aren’t really mad about government incompetence.
If I had to make my best guess, I’d say that they are mad that they are losing their country to “them.” Who is “them”? All of those people that the Tea Party people have come to see as different than they are. Outsiders. People who look differently and talk differently and dress differently. I don’t think of it as racism, though Tea Party people tend to be noticeably race-conscious. But they are also mad about those who belong to the wrong religions and those who come from the wrong countries. But how odd that they think that they are part of the same ingroup as the rich guys who are screwing them. Maybe it’s that skin color thing after all . . .
They are feeling like they they don’t control the country anymore–and they are throwing a huge tantrum. This is what I suspect.
What I've noticed about the TEA party rhetoric is that it is very shallow. Most of it seems to be driven by very wealthy and corporate culture to use "too much government" as a scapegoat for the problems caused by not enough government.
Think about it for a minute.
Deregulation of the financial industies, in other words, a reduction in the federal governance of those industries, allowed the formation of the "too big to fail" banks with their self serving vested conflicts of interest. It was those multinational mega banks that created those instruments of financial armaggedon, the debt derivatives.
It was not the government's community reinvestment act that broke the housing market, not the first time home buyers, but the real estate speculators building "wealth" by flipping real estate, often borrowing money against the future value of the propertry instead of the real value. It was not the government that pushed the fraudulent loans with a high risk of default, nor was it the government that promoted the rather stupid idea a pool of high risk mortgages would magically be a low risk investment.
But TEA Partiers don't get "it".
Privatization of government services is a way of reducing government size and influence. This is not a new idea, but in our current economy, privatization is shifting the government's responsibilities from the people to the contracting corporations. Consider: If a large chunk of military spemding goes to paying security contractors such as Xe, and Xe loses that revenue stream when the war ends, wouldn't it be in the best interest of Xe and its shareholders to make certain the war never ends?
But TEA Partiers don't give that much thought. They think privatizing government will reduce taxes when in reality is will increase taxes as the government control shifts to the contractors.