A simple suggestion
Like smallpox the Tea Party is still with us. Well it is more a mood than a Party, and while not entirely reducible to the KKK as the KKK might exist today it struggles to gain distance from that. Seriously follow any online discussion or set of comments where they attach themselves to and watch what points of view turn up. Sock puppets in sheets and pointed hoods. The weak leadership associated with this "Tea" Party guarantees that nothing to isolate or excise bigotry from the movement will ever get underway. Instead the procedure will be to weakly deny it, or simply pretend not to see it at all. The other thing becoming clearer as time goes on is that while they rode to town on a debt crisis horse and under that banner their band wagon filled, if you scratch the surface you find obsessions and legislative initiatives of the religious right, and the affair is rather less than wholly libertarian. A significant portion of the tea party is a social conservative bait and switch The Tea Party Is Losing Steam - Joshua Green - Politics - The Atlantic.
A further aspect of the movement is their passionate and conspiratorial embrace of the idea that government is as evil as it is unnecessarily big (unless they have a task for it). I linked to one of Richard Hofstadter's essays on this subject in a post last fall . He was writing in response to McCarthysim and, in the early sixties, to Goldwater's tub thumping. Many of his essays can be found in the collected sets The paranoid style in American politics, and other essays. and Anti-intellectualism in American life. "Whatever happended to AntiTrust" in the former is a fascinating read. There is nothing deader in America than Anti Trust. There are those who say Hofstadter's considerations do not apply to the current Tea Party or Birther situation (currently catching its breath) because he was concerned primarily with demagogic control of the paranoid style. The paranoid style refers as much to the charisma to the exploiting political figure as the styling of the crowd. This is the age of the self organizing mob though. it is significant enough that a persistent strain of paranoid style exists in the America populace, jejune and largely prepackaged. Feeding off the bombast of its own reflected image in the media.
All of that aside I have suggestion for them, a simple suggestion. The tea party and birther contingent should sue the President. The case is simple and straightforward, the takings clause right there in the constitution -- fifth amendment -- freedom from abuse by the government. Barack Obama's competence, or rather if you prefer, his failure to fail. His uncooperative inability to live down to their expectations degrades the value of their whiteness. It leaves their world hollow by showing whitness alone is not the sufficient condition. This is a plain eminent domain taking. Leaving them below well below their perceived market value. It is an expropriation of thier commonly understood supremacy. A confiscation and dispossession of an established property right. a violation of obvious natural laws. It should go forward, I think you will agree, into the courts as a class action suit.
With that offered extended, I feel compelled to a review of other touchstones. What was the point of birtherism? Denigrating the end of Osama Bin Laden I can see, refusing to admit it or mark the accomplishment they don't want to see Obama as competent.
But the point of trying to wave the last two years all away, by somehow demonstrating that the man who inarguably grew up and was educated in the US. Educated to an elite level, teaching at Chicago Law school. Winning an Illinois Senatorial election, and four years later the Presidency by a significant margin. That somehow they could get all that to vanish if they can just cover their eyes and doubt his established birth in Honolulu. The only thing it truly marks is a bitter low sourness, a blanket refusal of acceptance. Obama's centrist competence, His stolid and pragmatic sense of hope and change. These are an anathema to his supporters, who desire him activist and crusading. His mere existence naphtha to the right who desire him impotent and stereotyped.
If one thing that holds the Tea Party together it is the vague and inarticulately stated notion that in some way there oughta be a law A law against change. A law against physical change, change in circumstance, situation and status. Against perceived changes in values. For keeping the porch light on, as long as the porch light has a burning filament light bulb.
11:42:34 PM  ;;
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