STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Tea Party Declining: A Fundamental Misreading of History
By Staff News & Analysis - November 07, 2013

Virginia, Alabama Voter Choices Show Tea Party Declining … In the closing days of his losing campaign for Virginia's governorship, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called the contest a referendum on Obamacare. Virginia voter Lee Killen saw it instead as a referendum on the Tea Party – and he voted no. Killen, a Republican-turned-independent from Fairfax, cast his ballot for Terry McAuliffe less to endorse the Democrat than to lodge a protest against the small-government movement he said has hijacked his former party. "I don't particularly like McAuliffe, but I went with him basically because I disagree with the Tea Party approach to life – no compromise, no middle ground," Killen, 70, a retired software engineer, said in an interview just after casting his vote yesterday. "Cuccinelli has been a Tea Party leader from the very beginning, and those values are not my values." – Bloomberg

Dominant Social Theme: George Bush and the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party had it right. Political compromise with Democrats is what has made the US great and will keep it that way.

Free-Market Analysis: This opening Bloomberg excerpt describes "a retired software engineer" who believes the Tea Party has hijacked his party. Our question: What party is he talking about?

And here is another question: Just what the hell is the Tea Party? Perhaps the Bloomberg article is referring to the formal Tea Party movement that has been all but taken over by the mainstream Republican Party. That Tea Party offers a platform based on lower taxes, less government regulation and – to some degree – traditional biblical values that have always been popular in the Midwest and the South.

What exactly did Killen find so repugnant that he was forced to vote against the Tea Party as a "protest"? We would like to ask Killen some questions, in fact. Does he believe the US is headed in the right direction? Nearly 50 million are now living at or below the poverty line, apparently. Is this a positive trend, in his view?

Why then did he vote for more of the same? The US is involved in over 50 wars and global skirmishes as of this writing. Is that a good thing? The "surveillance society" exposed by Edward Snowden shows that the US military/industrial/Intel society is out of control. George Orwell's 1984 is not around the proverbial corner. It has seemingly arrived.

Obamacare demands that people give up their health care plans or the IRS will intrusively seek to confiscate a "fine." IRS tax enforcers are now carrying military hardware. The inaptly named Homeland Security has been busily purchasing 1.5 billion rounds of hollow point bullets that blossom on impact, ripping out viscera as they go.

Taxes and inflation have impoverished tens of millions. And millions have lost prosperity in the last downturn that has lasted some five years now. The stock market is up but so is unemployment, with millions working in gray and black markets to avoid government regulations and monetary confiscations.

The US was once an exception, a republic that was lightly governed. Today, it is a kind of corporate oligarchy in which those who work for a mercantilist technocracy are handsomely rewarded while those who for one reason or another do not are left behind.

The Democrat candidate that Killen voted for surely endorsed much of the above, one way or another. At least the military, economic and political trends that have created the above dysfunction. The Tea Party candidate surely endorsed less of it. Yet Killen supposedly made a "protest vote" against the Tea Party candidate.

That's a pretty wacky vote, in our view. But the Bloomberg article portraying this trend doesn't focus over-much on the US's decline. It prefers to make the case that the "Tea Party" itself is declining. Here's more:

McAuliffe's win makes him the first candidate of a sitting president's party in 40 years to win Virginia's governorship, handing Democrats control of a politically competitive state whose demographics reflect an increasingly diverse U.S. electorate.

… The race, which hit high gear amid last month's 16-day partial federal government shutdown driven by Tea Party activists in Congress and the botched rollout of the 2010 health-care law, became a test case for the two parties' reputations, policy arguments and weaknesses one year out from midterm congressional elections. It also served as a cautionary tale for Republicans about the limits of the Tea Party's appeal.

"I used to be a Republican, but since the Tea Party has come into the Republican Party, I just can't — they're too extreme," said Steven Feusier, 62, another Fairfax resident who voted for McAuliffe. He said he backed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 and outgoing Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in 2009 yet couldn't bring himself to support Cuccinelli.

… "That's really the overriding thing: He's too extreme, he's not willing to compromise, and all that other stuff just isn't convincing in light of that," Feusier said. In the Alabama Republican primary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce decided to weigh in after Young spotlighted his opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage and said there was no need to raise the government's debt ceiling, which would have risked a U.S. default.

… Governor Chris Christie's re-election romp in heavily Democratic New Jersey after a campaign in which he touted his bipartisan appeal — mirror what recent national polls show is a broader repudiation of the Tea Party and its unbending approach.

"The Tea Party has lost a lot of support over time, and now in our polling, we have found the most negative views for the Tea Party that we've found since we started measuring" three years ago, said Carroll J. Doherty, an associate director at Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington.

The article doesn't mention that Pew (which it cites) is an extremely liberal research and polling group. Nor does the article mention the abiding suspicion in the alternative 'Net media that US votes are rigged these days thanks to the abandonment of hand ballots that provided a paper trail. There is simply no doubt that the US "ruling class" – business execs, Pentagon officials and national politicians – are all aghast at the idea of returning to a less controlled and mercantilist society.

But that is probably going to happen despite any manipulations now taking place. Bloomberg can write articles about the decline of the Tea Party, but what we call the Internet Reformation is continuing to strengthen, in our humble view.

Just like the Gutenberg press before it, the Internet is the trigger for massive social and philosophical changes. The dominant social themes that the power elite used so successfully in the 20th century to organize and reshape society just aren't working that well anymore.

These fear-based memes are increasingly foundering and losing their persuasiveness. No longer are intelligent people so easily frightened into giving up power and wealth to specially prepared globalist solutions like the UN and IMF.

Belief structures are changing and that is why an article like this one in Bloomberg is so profoundly wrong-headed. As we have often stated, the REAL Tea Party in the US is the result of sociological trends put in place by the Internet itself. The real Tea Party is a state-of-mind not a political facility. And it is generating sociopolitical changes in Europe, as well, and will soon do the same in Asia and China.

Cultural evolutions are very hard to control. The hive mind takes over and produces changes that were evident after the advent of the Gutenberg press – the Renaissance and then to a lesser extent the Reformation and Enlightenment.

The latter two epochs were in part generated by the very power elite that the Gutenberg press was unseating. These episodes were led by elite agents apparently, but the end result was the same: The movements found their own direction as cultural changes proved uncontrollable. Freedom resulted. Old control mechanisms foundered and failed.

This is surely what is happening today. The insistence that the "Tea Party" is waning is an elite dominant social theme but one that will prove as transient as the idea that the profound changes inspired by Gutenberg were ephemeral. They were not.

After Thoughts

This Bloomberg article introducers us to a fundamental misreading of history. It is journalism at its shallowest. Read the alternative 'Net media for insights instead of propaganda.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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