Monday, June 28, 2010

The Tea Party Explained



This analysis is one of the best explanations I've read about the Tea Party, which is a loose collection of people who share one thing in common: frustration with the status quo.  It comes in the wake of the South Carolina primaries that saw two Tea Party favored candidates prevail.  In both cases, they were minorities beating middle aged white guys.

A pattern seems to be emerging that runs through the views of those who identify with Tea Party, and it doesn't appear to be a strictly "throw the bums out" mentality.  It doesn't make sense to punish people for nothing other than incumbency, and many incumbents are surviving.

The question is why some incumbents survive if the Tea Party nothing more than a "throw the bums out" style movement:
This question that can be easily answered by those who have argued all along that the Tea Partiers are just a collection of crackpots and dodos, incapable of seeing where their true self-interest lies. What else would you expect from such idiots? But there is another way of interpreting the South Carolina primaries. The real target of Tea Party wrath is not the establishment or incumbency, but cronyism.
Such cronyism exists in many aspects of life, not the least of which is Wall Street and its relationship with Washington, DC.  There is, perhaps, nothing more American than the notion people should advance on their own merits rather than their status or birth.

It will be interesting to see how this theme continues to play out through the rest of the year.

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