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Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, writes about what the Tea Parties are really about.
(Hint: It doesn't involve hating anyone, hunting wolves from helicopters, funding from the Bavarian Illuminati, or any of the other smears you've heard.)
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BTW - I hadn't heard the one about helicopter hunting - what's that about?
It does, however, contain common smears against the Democrats, which shows that it is not a balanced analysis, but rather a biased justification.
> "The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people
> cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes
> supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and
> guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by
> union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better
> decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the
> culture of dependence."
Translation: "Oh noes, the Dems are gonna make us a socialized country!"
> "But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are
> trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens'
> dependence on it."
This is stated baldly, with no supporting evidence. It's just assumed as a truth known about the intent of the Democratic Party, and is used as a premise for later analysis in the article. Hence, it is essentially an axiom.
I don't buy it as such.
* * *
The TEA Party claims to be a populist movement. Yahoo's online dictionary defines "populism" as: "1a. A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite."
Fair enough. The TP certainly uses rhetoric attacking elites. But look at the elites they attack - almost exclusively Democrats and any Republican who crosses the aisle. They decry unions - but say nothing against Massey Energy, a coal company with one of the worst safety records in the industry, and one that has successfully prevented unionization of its employees.
Don't get me wrong - I'm against most unions. Not because I see unions as creating a "culture of dependence", but because, IMO, too many unions have become the very things they were formed to prevent - reactionary organizations interested only in maintaining the power of the top dogs, and abusing the workers who actually provide the elite class with its power.
The TP may be against elitism, but it is an unbalanced choice of elites to be against.
* * *
The TP claims to be a popular movement. "Popular": "3 Of, representing, or carried on by the people at large: the popular vote."
If you look at the demographics of the TP, this is not true. While it is true that the TP does draw from all races, ages, genders and political views, the majority of its membership base can be described as "WASP, male, conservative." This demographic is skewed to that of the country as a whole.
* * *
My opinion: The TP is a fracturing of the Republican Party, representing those who feel the Party is insufficiently conservative. It is neither truly populist nor popular, and whether denied or stated boldly, at the core it is a reactionary response to a non-"WASP, male, conservative" president.
* * *
The Republican Party has long had an internal power struggle between the more centrist conservatives and the far right. This latter group has spawned the militia movement, the "Moral Majority" and others of that ilk, and now the TP.
The TP has some good ideas. I'm in favor of smaller government, fiscal responsibility and only spending what you've got funding for. In that, I do identify with some of the more centrist Republican platform points.
But I cannot support the TP because it is unbalanced. If they equally attacked the elitism of the Republican Party, perhaps. But as it is, no.
[More to come, trying to stay under 4300 caharacter comment limit]
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I'm rather regarding much the rhetoric you quoted there as opinion. However, Democratic administrations do have a well-established history of expanding the role and scope of government, which is not changed by the fact that recently Republican administrations have shrugged, said "What the hell", and jumped right in there with them.
Referring back to the article for a moment, "Barack Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000, and lost those with incomes in between." If the majority of voters making over $200,000 voted Democratic, this sort of implies that the majority of "elites" are Democratic. In which case, if the Tea Parties position themselves against wealthy elites, it sort of necessarily follows that the majority of those are going to be Democrats, by simple demographics.
I'm not convinced the demographic is as clear-cut as you think it is. In particular, from what I've seen, it seems actual membership/support is pretty well gender-balanced, and I'm not convinced about the overwhelmingly-WASP charge either. Conservative? Yes, that's pretty clear; more fiscally conservative than socially, but yeah, the TP demographics are pretty clearly conservative-leaning. However, one can equally clearly say that the Democratic Party's demographic is clearly progressive-leaning. Does this inherently discredit or invalidate Democratic politics?
Now we're getting into semantics. If you were to say something like "It's composed heavily of former Republican voters who feel their party has abandoned them", I'd have to agree with you. That's not the same thing as being a fracturing of the Republican party. It might be more true to say that it's a return to much of what the Republican party once was, but has not been since at least Reagan.
"Not populist or popular"? I think it's pretty hard to support a statement that a movement which, according to polls, has grown from 16% to 24% of the electorate in the past month (http://lnk.nu/rasmussenreports.com/19b8), plus a further 11% undecided, is not popular, and if a movement composed mainly of middle-class, former middle-class, and working-class voters isn't populist, then I have to admit to being a little baffled at what it would take to qualify.
Comparing the Tea Parties to the Moral Majority says to me that you haven't actually listened to what the Tea Parties are saying. Many Tea Partiers are strongly religious, yes. To tar them with the Moral Majority brush or say they're far-right because of that is completely unjustifiable.
Then how can you support the Democratic party?
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1. Helicopter hunting:
aaAAaahh. Hadn't heard that. But then, I don't consider Sarah Palin to be representative of anything except Sarah's Palin's best interests. The news that she likes to hunt wolves from a helicopter makes me like her even less, but that's about it.
2. The quotes and whether they're opinions or axioms.
Certainly they're opinions. They may even be informed opinions - something I'll agree to disagree on.
But they're stated as bald truths, and much of the enduing analysis is based on them. Thus they assume the function of axioms.
3. "Then how can you support the Democratic party?"
Short answer: I don't.
Long answer: I'll ask to move this to my LJ, because I have a feeling it's gonna take several days, several drafts, and several thousand bytes overthe comment size limit.
4. Elitism.
I think there is a flaw in their statistics. They're comparing number of voters and wealth. If the wealth was evenly spread out among those >$200k voters, the claim would make sense. But you I both know that it's not. Wealth is clustered, with the top brackets holding a disproportionate amount.
What would happen, I wonder, if they split that $>200k into finer granularity? Would they find that 200k-1m bloc might have the voters and be heavily Democratic, while the >1m bloc was vastly smaller but had far more of the total wealth, and was heavily Republican?
I've got a strong feeling it would show that. So that while it is true - and loudly stated in the article - that the body count of >$200k voters leans Democratic, the true elites and concentration of wealth is Republican.
Be a fun question to check out.
5. Demograpics, WASPs, etc.
I don't say it's clear-cut. I say it's _skewed_ to the general population. That means that, IMO, an analysis would show a statistical significance beyond sampling error. But it's not, and never will be, a 1:1 correlation.
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Side note: Yeah, I find the comment length limit obnoxious. It betrays poor design, IMHO. It suggests a static allocation for comments (and why 4300?) which is too small for a very few and more than an order of magnitude larger than needed for the vast majority. Even if it is dynamic allocation with a 4300-char cap, really, how many comments would exceed that? One in a thousand?
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And I'm also pretty sure that the limit isn't (or mostly isn't) due to storage considerations, but to network traffic. A lot of the design, I understand, stems from the fact that Danga, for most of its existence until 6A bought it, was strapped for cash, and had to pinch pennies on everything - not just servers and disks, but network gear and ISP/hosting/telco recurring costs.