All Tomorrow's Parties?

  Just by principle, I've always been simultaneously underwhelmed and annoyed by the Tea Party "movement." I have trouble considering a group of largely middle-aged white conservatives as a "movement," since historically consequential political movements are either young (the uprise of post-Kennedy liberalism in the sixties, as well as the Founding Fathers, who were for the most part on the young-ish side, and upstarts at that), minority-based (such as the Black Panther Party), or liberal (the Progressive movement in the early 1900s). This is not to say that the pendulum never swings to the conservative side, or that middle-aged white men tend to hold political power, but a movement which isn't young and doesn't have liberal vitality seems extremely laughable and likely to fail. But the Tea Party has been gaining quite a bit of media attention, first as a sort of sideshow of old guys in Patriot hats, but in the past two weeks, the Tea Partiers have been talked about everywhere from PBS' Newshour to the Today show, culminating in the most recent issue of TIME which features an oversized teacup on its cover. The group is still relatively small, still rallying with misspelled posters advertising fabricated anti-Obama conspiracies, still demanding a return to how America used to be (which is highly ironic, because if the majority of the party had been alive during, say, the Revolution, they'd probably all be dead. Lower life expectancy. And if they were actually living I highly doubt they would have enjoyed the progressivism of employing a new form of government. But I digress). The issue is that the Tea Party is actually winning, beating out establisment Republican candidates in Senate races in Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Alaska, Kentucky, Florida, and Delaware. Delaware is the latest story, featuring former anti-masturbation pundit Christine O'Donnell as the newest Republican Senate nominee who looks like a poor man's Sarah Palin and speaks in a bastardized version of apocryphal Jeffersonian with taglines like "When the government fears the people, there is liberty." There is also, of course, the off-chance that perhaps a government which was originally set in place to protect the liberty of its citizens and has managed to provide levels of freedom superior to the majority of the world's nations is actually a pretty damn good source of liberty, but the Tea Party doesn't really deal with such novelties as "reason" or "rationality."

   The "cause," as O'Donnell and others refer to it, desires a small central government, financial markets with little-to-no restrictions, low regulation, and few federal entitlements (TIME). The extreme conservatism doesn't bode well for traditional Republic candidates, but also haunts Democrats; Republicans have been voting more in this year's off-season primaries anyhow. Tea Party candidates, such as O'Donnell and Alaska's Joe Miller have been elected after elections with very few voters, and these candidates sell themselves based on their supposed connection to the "people;" they have very little political experience, which they somehow have twisted into a selling point. It's all part of their anti-elite campaign, regardless of the fact that they don't represent minority groups or the working poor or pro-union workers or the young or the politically literate or the non-radical conservatives. Their definition of the "people" is vague and largely incomplete. Personally, I don't feel threatened by or afraid of this Te Party; I think it's silly, and since I'm not a member of the GOP I'm not worried about my party being toppled. But on the other hand, I would feel a lot better having a more moderate GOP, and not have to live under the discretion of politicians elected by the idiot masses because they are, as Rush Limbaugh or  Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, the ones farthest to the right. The demagogues are pushing for their supporters to vote as extremely conservative as possible, according to the TIME article, and even though I have enough faith in people to trust that most won't listen to the crazies, victories by people like O'Donnell make me question the sanity of conservative voters. These are the same people who call Obama a socialist, and here they are, vouching for the extreme right and not expecting to be called fascists -- obviously, I know this isn't fascism, but I mean it is a pretty hypocritical situation. But whatever, I keep digressing. Back to politics, I just don't agree with the Tea Party's support of devolution of health care and the EPA and the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. The Tea Party will likely die out by 2012, and if not that, then definitely 2016, but as for now they're an annoyance with increasing clout. Or maybe not. Maybe all this media focus just makes it seem that way.