FCA 8/26/10
On the political spectrum there are corresponding right and
left radical fringes. During the Bush years the far left was making lots of
noise; now with Obama the Tea Party is making lots of noise. The Tea Party and
far left are mirrored cousins, opposites yet similar in nature. Each are rigid
purists and can’t stand the idea of being led by a differing ideology. These
people are true believers. A certain amount of black and white thinking is
characteristic of the fringes.
Tea Party:
60% men
75% 45 years +
89% white
36% South
25% West
22% Midwest
29% HS or less
33% some college
35% less than $50K
56% $50K+
58% guns in household
54% Republican
41% Independent
73% conservative
39% evangelical
61% Protestant
38% attend weekly religious service
The average profile of the Tea Party: white, baby boomer,
red state/ rural, less educated/ less worldly, middle to lower middle class,
has guns, conservative/ Republican, Protestant/ religious, goes to church.
These are people left in the dust (alienated) by changing
demographics in the US. As the country becomes more multiethnic, more global in
focus and having to address issues resulting from increasing modernization, the
uneducated white guys from red states are finding themselves in the minority
and they don’t like it. A good old days type of Nativism is invoked and then
referenced as being literally true from the Constitution and the Bible.
The Tea Party is mostly for alienated, poor, uneducated
white guys. They are against civil rights for blacks, think Obama favors
blacks, are part-ways racist, homophobic, anti-Islamic and anti-Hispanic, are
anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, against universal health care,
against the stimulus package, against TARP, don’t believe global warming is
man-caused, are against any fossil fuels emission restrictions and against any
common sense gun policies.
They want to blame the government but it is their own
mythical freedom of contract guys, big business, who are screwing them the most
with outsourcing, off-shoring and global business strategies. This is why some
accuse the Tea Party of being a smokescreen for the anti-tax rich and say the
movement is “Astroturf”, not a real grass roots movement, because it is funded
and manipulated by groups led by the likes of Dick Armey, Karl Rove and the
billionaire Koch brothers, all quintessential insiders known to favor big
money, big business and no government regulation.
The far left is against corruption of big business and the
far right is against corruption of government. There is no denying that
corruption creeps into both politics and economics. However, to postulate that
the nature of our troubles stems from only one and not any of the other, is
absurd. This is where it would help for people to have a bit bigger perspective
and able to include multiple points of view.
Additonal Tea Party
aspects:
-The Tea Party has a tendency to fundamentalism; the Bible
and the US Constitution are seen as literally true, history and politics become
a matter of faith rather than knowledge, yes, all people pick and choose their
facts but in the case of literalists it gets into magical thinking, a priori assumptions trump actual
history, there’s no discussion, no nuance
-William Blake:
The vision of Christ
that thou dost see
Is my vision's deepest
enemy...
Thine is the friend of
all mankind,
Mine speaks in
parables to the blind:
Thine loves the same
world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are
my Hell gates...
Both read the Bible
day and night
But thou read'st black
where I read white...
William Blake
-people cherry pick the Bible and Constitution to only
support their thesis and ignore contradictory info, yes, we all do it, yet our
national motto from the seal of the USA, e
pluribus unum/ unity from diversity
(adopted by an Act of Congress in 1782) demands that we at least
be able to have a public debate of differing views without total vilification
of other citizens, government policy is made by men of reason, government is
not religion
-The Tea Party has a tendency for ideological purity tests,
no room for shades of grey; this is divisive because it is all or nothing, no
wider perspective allowed; history gets cherry picked and purified to be
congruent with a current narrow ideology, the Tea Party is way off to the
right, not in the center by any means
-the actual Boston Tea Party was about lack of
representation, today’s Tea Partiers have representation, they just
don’t like the representatives, the goal is to unseat these representatives and
replace them with ultra-conservatives, evangelicals and libertarians, so the
historical comparison with the Boston Tea Party is inaccurate, a fiction, only
the anger is in common
-poor, white, rural conservatives are becoming a minority
demographically and politically, the whole “Take Back Vermont” type of feeling
of the Tea Party is sour grapes of a percent of the population which is
becoming disempowered
-the Founders were not a unified whole with solid common
purpose, (see the Jefferson/ Hamilton camps) that they were is a myth of 19th
century romantic nationalism and nationalism is well known for emphasizing
cultural myths, cultural exceptionalism, racism, vilifying immigrants
(Nativism) etc. and this area is ripe for fictionalizing the world into bumper
sticker slogans rather than taking the time to understand complex phenomena
-for example, the Jefferson/ Hamilton debate comes into the
present in the argument about regulation, do we let businesses pollute,
exploit, lie and cheat on the pretext of freedom? There has been a persistent
tension in US history between more and less regulation, tension between more of
an activist state and a small, pro-business government, and to me this really
boils down to the rights of the little guy versus the rights of the big guys,
more regulation equals help for little guys (social programs, public health,
social security etc), less regulation lets the foxes in the henhouse (the rich
get richer)
-todays Tea Party is pretty much run on sour grapes at
losing to Obama, it’s about the marginalization of poor, rural, uneducated
whites, the South, that whole culture is turning into a minority and they don’t
like it
-the top 1% of American earners take home ¼ and more
of all income, yet the Republicans and Tea Partiers don’t want to let the Bush
tax cuts expire for these people, the whole anti-tax thing doesn’t make sense
in this case at all, this is not “small business” by any stretch of the
imagination, the government is in serious debt and the extreme right wants to
cut taxes for the people most able to afford them
-the whole deal is infantile, it’s all scapegoating,
blaming and divisive, lowest common denominator pandering on all sides, selling
illusions and no call for sacrifice or responsibility, the sheer positionality
of it all makes it so no common ground emerges, being rigidly positional is a
problem, they are going to harvest what they’ve sown
- Our economic problem is structural, the whole
thing is based on a growth model and ever-increasing consumption. Nobody’s
method can stop a systemic shrinkage/ correction. We don’t have malaise, the
ship has started to bottom out, it’s not a matter of culture or attitude, it’s
a disease of the whole beast. The US is not the top dog anymore and looking to
the past is not going to get us back there. Resources are not unending; the
whole world can’t aspire to a US style of consumer economy, the math doesn’t
add up.
- For consumers, a tax cut just shifts the cost from a tax
to a fee generated by entities who lost tax revenue, example of U of A library,
it was free, then there was a tax cut, then $35 a year, then $50 a year for the
public to get a library card. Cutting taxes doesn’t do away with costs it just
shifts them to fees. Anti-tax hysteria is a shell game, costs don’t ever go
away, they just change form and name.
-How is it that people rabidly want tax cuts but then also
want public services? These tax cut people should get no public spending on
them at all, no street lights, nothing, it’s an abdication of citizenship to
not want to participate in the public good. Taxation is the price of civilized
society. When you leave it all private you end up with foxes in the henhouse,
Savings & Loan scandal, Enron, Dot Com and real estate burst bubbles.
Private enterprise has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with the keys to
the vault. Let the Republicans acknowledge that and Democrats should
acknowledge that too much bureaucracy is no panacea; too many regulations do
bog things down. A bloated bureaucracy makes it so no one is ever accountable,
you can never get through to anyone, nothing is ever done, it is all lost in
the sauce. The inertia of bloated bureaucracy is a problem but the answer is
not to throw the bay out with the bath water. We need a middle ground here, not
unending divisive purity tests.
-reality, certainty, fact, proof, statement, opinion
-a historical argument must be supported by primary and
secondary sources, if it is clear that Tea Party and biblical literalism
actually ignore primary sources that flat out contradict their theses, then it
becomes more of wishful, magical thinking unsupported argument, it is faith
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