I attended a Tea Party thing a couple of months ago at Sunset Park in Henderson, Nevada, just to see for myself what these people were all about. I was astounded at the level of ignorance and flat-out crazy on display. They were exclusively white, upper middle class to wealthy and mostly middle-age or older. All of the nut job talking points were covered from the "birthers" and the "death panels" people to those who called President Obama a "Nazi", a "fascist", a "communist", a "socialist", a "Marxist", a "Maoist", a "Trotskyite" and any combination of those terms imaginable.
I was dressed in khaki pants and a golf shirt, and since I am in my early 50's with short hair, I was able to mingle easily and was accepted as one of their own. Usually in hushed tones, the word "nigger" was rampant when describing the President. It's my belief that there are three motivations for this group:
1) They had total control of the federal government, including the Supreme Court, for six years and their so-called "conservative philosophy" was foisted on the country unfettered in any way. The result? Two wars (one of which was illegal and immoral, resulting in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians), the worst economy in 80 years and the total loss of respect and admiration for America by the international community, including our allies. The Bush years were an absolute failure in every way imaginable, and they have only themselves to blame for electing that idiot not once, but twice. Their "philosophy" was tested and utterly exposed as the unmitigated joke that we "liberals" knew it to be since the Reagan years.
2) Racism. It was pretty obvious to me that many, many of these people are upset that we have an "uppity" black man in The White House.
3) Resistance to change. A very common cry was that they "want their country back". They remind me of the people who constantly wish for a return to the "good old days" of the 1950's. Well, if you were a middle-class to wealthy white American during that time, things were pretty good. But if you were poor, or a minority, or both, those days were pretty grim.
Just before the start of the Iraq War, I attended an anti-war rally on the Las Vegas Strip in front of the Bellagio Hotel. There were about 300 people there I would guess and we were peaceful and civil. Nonetheless, we were called "traitors" and "communists" by some of the passers-by and even threatened by one man with a knife (he was arrested). The speakers at the front of the Bellagio property repeatedly played "God Bless America", the national anthem, and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" at very loud volume. We stood silently with our hands over our hearts every time.
At that rally we were hoping to avert a war on a country that had done nothing to us and that would most likely lead to disastrous circumstances. Unfortunately, we were eventually proven right. But we were motivated by our love for this country and a desire to protect it from a monumental mistake. When I hear the tea party crowd calling for our country to fail and calling our President a "Nazi", etc. I wonder what their real motivation is.
From Oliver Willis:
Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid
A post over at the Seminalis taking “liberal elitism” to task for not taking the Tea Party people seriously, and that that will lead to the election of Sarah Palin and other such ilk.
To quote our vice president, malarkey.
While I have long argued that there is too much elitism on the left for my tastes, there’s a wide gulf between holding your nose in the air for no good reason and dumbing yourself down in order to appeal to the lowest common idiotic denominator. Suck is the case with the Tea Party group and their leaders like Palin.
Far from the liberals in the ’70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today’s left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don’t involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, todays liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don’t advance as a movement.
The problem is that the vast majority of the issues brought up by the tea party types and Palin are idiotic. These aren’t people with the traditional lower-middle class concerns of Americans (which is my family background) but instead these are people who largely believe the conspiracy du jour, whether that involves secret armies, the president’s “true” nationality, or Nancy Pelosi’s “death panels” that are set up to pull the plug on Grandma.
While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.
Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. That resulted in a narrow focus and deserved electoral losses. But the idea that the tea party movement represents any sort of rational discourse deserving of recognition and outreach is absurd. These are, by and large, the same band of stupid people we have always had in this country, whether they were in favor of submission to the British empire, secession from the union, alliancewith Hitler, or decrying the president a “half breed Muslim terrorist”, we owe them no recognition or inclusion in the important discussion about the direction of American society.
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