cej-deactivated20110202 asked: Forgive me if you've addressed this already but I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Tea Party movement.
Oh, the tea party.
That’s a topic worthy of discussion which would undoubtedly be tl:dr for the interwebs. So here’s the short version:
- The anti-government fervor is good — very good — but I’m concerned that it’s actually anti-Democrat fervor. We’ll have to wait and see how the tea partiers respond once the GOP is back in power.
- I’ve repeatedly read that polls show the tea party is basically divided in loyalty between Ron Paul and Sarah Palin — i.e. liberty in economic, social, and foreign policy or low taxes and a big military. Sadly, it seems to be trending away from the former and towards the latter. But once again, we probably just have to wait and see where this goes and if the GOP succeeds in entirely co-opting it. (“Wait and see” is going to be a theme of this post, as you’ll notice.)
- Though there is an unfortunate strain of militarism and American exceptionalism in much of the tea party, I don’t think it should be written off just yet. Many of the tea parties are quite new to politics and may not be very well informed at this point, but they do know that they don’t like the way government has grown in recent years. In other words, they are good candidates to become libertarians. It’s easy for those of us who have long been aware of the equally awful problems with both major parties to disdain the tea parties as too little, too partisan, too late…but as much as I’d often like to do that myself, I’m inclined to say it’s still a little early to make such a sweeping decision against them. (The same caution does not apply to Mr. Beck and Mrs. Palin, but that’s another post entirely.)
- All that said, I do not consider myself a tea party member. It’s definitely an older crowd and tends to be rather reactionary for my taste. But again, even though it’s been around for ages in political time, it’s only been about three years since the first Ron Paul/Boston Tea Party moneybomb, and a mere two years since Ron Paul supporter Trevor Leach organized the first teat party protest. And in regular time that’s really not long at all.
