A Brief Meditation on the Tea Party

[inibo.livejournal.com]

Electoral politics are immoral or at least futile. I have no illusions that the net effect of the recent elections will ultimately produce anything more than some wonderful entertainment for my inner cynic. However, I do think the Tea Party is articulating something important. The middle class, what's left of it, is losing faith in the state and the state has run out of options for pacifying them. It is in its death throes. I think people sense it on an intuitive level, but they haven't realized it consciously, yet. The Tea Party is that intuition grappling with uncertainty. The next few years are going to be the process of the intuition and impulse evolving into understanding.

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

No, not really. This is my-side/your-side. No great revelations here. No impending anarchic awakening. Sowwy. :(

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Yep. Totally right.

Tuesday was the best election the Chamber of Commerce could buy.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

+1

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

luckily sour grapes are still cheap for the dems.

[inibo.livejournal.com]

Well, when the same independents who made Obama's original sweep so overwhelming turn around and give the the Republican's (who will blow it once again) the House, I think there's a bit more to it than that. The Democratic and Republican Parties are certainly playing my-side/your-side, but the people they are playing with are getting sick of it. In the meantime Ben Bernanke is running the presses overtime. Jerry Brown is not going to save California. The wars on going to keep grinding on to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. One morning you are going to wake up and realize your money is worthless, you job is gone and no one is going to help you but yourself and whatever real community you've established.

Things are beginning to unravel. I might be wrong on my timing, it may linger on another decade, but when it finally collapses it will be fast.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I take my prophecies from the recognized sources, thanks.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

And then some other form of government will replace it. Most likely one that's not nearly as comfortable as the one we're in now. This might be a good time to review the whole 'careful what you hope for' scenario.

A rudimentary analysis of history shows that the state always returns.

[pattyoplenty.livejournal.com]

With regards to Jerry Brown, it amazes me that he was re-elected again after this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKjZZZV5Ack

Wow!

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I think the state has a bit of gas left in it. It would help if we could figure out something cool to make and sell.

[inibo.livejournal.com]

The gas you smell is printers' ink.

Coming up with cool things require entrepreneurship, ease of market entry, competition and accurate price signals. The regulatory-corporate complex has made market entry almost prohibitively difficult and expensive and competition almost impossible. Monopoly control and manipulation of the medium of exchange has nearly destroyed the process of price signals. Until that reality is addressed our days of cool stuff are coming to an end.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Uh, OK. But I'm not sure how the end of "cool stuff" correlates to the demise of the nation-state.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

"The gas you smell is printers' ink."

I liked that. :-)

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

I'm over the dramatic analysis of the Tea Party. They are utterly uninteresting, the majority being a branch among the Republican party who are making noise through corporate money, just like other groups have done and will do in the future.
The middle class is having issues along with everyone else who isn't rich in the US, you're right about that. But a huge part of the middle class isn't Tea Party, and the main problem isn't government.
The lifestyle Americans covet isn't going to last in the current reality, it's as simple as that. The Tea Party just wants to not be paying for anyone else than themselves, this is what the slogan "freedom" means in conservative world.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I think the assumption that electoral politics always 'are immoral or at least futile' is a great excuse for immoral or futile behavior in electoral politics.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

The Tea Party is almost exclusively the club of old white people - pretty much every survey shows them to be well over 90 percent white, and many of the group's own members have flatly stated that they're incapable of appealing to young people - which means that, due to both age and ever-increasing ethnic diversity in this country, they're LITERALLY DYING OUT. Even conservatives freely admit that the younger generations who are coming up refuse to buy into fears about "socialism" or paranoia about Islam or the demonization of gay marriage. What made the so-called "Republican Revolution" of the '80s so genuinely effective was that Reagan essentially RECRUITED an entire generation of young people who became ... well, the Tea Party of today. By contrast, not only does the Tea Party itself acknowledge its failure to do the same for those who are younger than themselves, but they act like they're not even INTERESTED in doing so. Unless the Tea Party can start connecting with mass numbers of voters who are younger than Baby Boomers - as Reagan did in spades - then this is a dead-cat bounce. Even among young people I know who consider themselves conservative, I've lost count of the number of them who have actually SAID that they just waiting for the older generation to finally DIE already, precisely because of their homophobia and Islamophobia and "socialist" fear-mongering.

[pattyoplenty.livejournal.com]

Wow, you truly have no idea what the TEA Party is even about. Keep believing this nonsense folks at places like Moveon.org & MSNBC are telling you.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Demographics don't lie.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

What people - even TEA Party members - say about the TEA Party and what it really is are two extremely different things. The very most essential thing you could say about any of them is that they are people who grossly benefit from the social programs set forth by Democratic administrations and legislatures nationwide for the past 80 years or so, who fervently campaign for those benefits to be ended for anyone who is not them. Like the rally the Rolling Stone writer went to where almost everyone was sitting on little electric wheelchair carts that they didn't pay for, while protesting that they didn't want to pay for anyone else's benefits. Clueless hypocrisy.

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

You can look it up: http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-timescbs-news-poll-national-survey-of-tea-party-supporters#document/p41

old and white, read the data.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately Box I think they've had plenty of time to breed another generation of people who hate others just because they're others. Hope I'm wrong though.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Nah, the Tea Party's a bunch of fat welfare bums who want every entitlement cut except the ones they depend on and consider cuts to the Defense Department, which are sorely needed and more spending these days goes to keeping Congressmen re-elected than to what we actually need to be blasphemy to their perverted vision of the United States.

If that's what the Middle Class can do, let's let the Working Class have a chance, mmkay?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And if electoral politics are immoral, what do you want us to replace it with? Civil wars every four years between the generals to decide who gets to rule?

[drcruel.livejournal.com]

I would be in favor of teabaggers evolving some understanding. Unfortunately, teabaggers don't believe in evolution.

[op-tech-glitch.livejournal.com]

They certainly don't seem to be subjected to much of it...............

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I see. You've been deliberately using that word in order to inflame the conversation. True?