Mythbusting The Tea Party

It's high time to ask the questions that challenge some of the surface myths that the Tea Party has been feeding to the media. So, we're firing back on eleven pieces of conventional wisdom about the tea party movement.

The End of the Tea Party

prospect.org — The most reliable lesson of recent American politics is that movements dependent on that level of heat eventually — or, actually, quite quickly — burn themselves out. The tea-party movement cannot be sustained at the level of anger that's currently fueling it. It may leave a permanent impact on the Republican Party, giving it some new faces and new language, and most important, allowing the party to divorce itself from the legacy of that squishy moderate, George W. Bush. But regardless of the economic times or the political mood, hot populism of both the left and right varieties has never had a very long run.

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Sara Robinson's picture

Tea Party: Everything You Know Is Wrong

The Tea Party is shaping up to be 2010's first major media darling. First came the storm of coverage that surrounded the Tea Party convention in Nashville two weeks ago. Then, they stole the show at last weekend's CPAC conference in DC. more »


Terrance Heath's picture

CPAC: Sideshow and Snake Oil, Pt 1.

The Sideshow

Glenn Beck, in a sense, is right. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is not and could never be a "big tent." Neither is the brand of conservatism it tries so hard to sell. The "big tent," to borrow his circus analogy is usually reserved for acts featuring genuine talent and skill that tend to draw people into the "big tent."

CPAC, as speaker after speaker demonstrated,  is more or less a sideshow -- relegated to a small tent, and populated with notions that  have no basis in and would never work in reality, and that just don't stand up to close inspection. Inside that small tent, where people who paid the admission price really want to believe their eyes, it works. But in the cold light of day, not so much.

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Tea Party Hypocrisy

thenation.com — For branding purposes that the right-wing organizers and activists draping themselves in nostalgia for the founding fathers would rather not find themselves tied in the public mind to the Republican Party, loathed by a significant minority of the electorate and distrusted by an overwhelming majority. The reason is not hard to divine: over the last decade, the GOP ran the country into the ground. While the party's rhetorical fidelity is to small government and a big military, it has for decades been operationally committed to no philosophy other than perpetual war, upward redistribution of wealth, the defense of corporate power and white Christian identity politics. But despite the tea party's arm's-length stance toward the GOP, these are precisely the values for which it stands.

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The Origin of Tea Party Rage

washingtonpost.com — Yes, parts of this movement do seem to be motivated by a new nativism and by racism. But it would be a mistake to see the hostility toward Obama only in terms of race. Something else is going on in the Tea Party movement, and it has deep roots in our history. Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington, dates all the way to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government. This suspicion of government is not amenable to "facts" — not because it is irrational, but because the facts are beside the point. For the anti-statists, opposing government power is a matter of principle. Understanding the principled anti-government radicalism that animates this movement explains why its partisans see the conservative Bush as a sellout and the cautiously liberal Obama as a socialist. For now, their fears of Obama are enough to tether the Tea Partiers to the GOP. In the long run, establishment Republicans are destined to disappoint them.

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