The Tea Party should be dispelled by any lawful means. My hope is that it will unravel by itself, but short of that we citizens have a civic responsibility not merely to not affiliate with it, but to spurn and discredit it. My only concern with "Crash the Tea Party" is that their efforts might be counterproductive. The underlying appropriateness of their strategy is dependent upon the appropriateness of the Tea Party itself, and the Tea Party is not some gentle beast but a bigoted, fascist, proto-paramilitary extremist political force that has all the makings of a terrorist organization, or, worse, a tyrannical governing minority. These Tea Party people have been severely deluded, constantly agitated and provoked, and are being driven toward violence--and the ones among them who aren't deluded are the ones doing the agitating, the provoking, and the driving, and their politics are as extreme as it gets.
Something like the Tea Party was inevitable; I even predicted it before it happened. As the GOP has become more extreme, it has also remained as a functionally installed political party bound at least minimally by the pragmatic constraints of democratic governance. Now, all of this constant propaganda by the right-wing media and fundamentalist religion has crystallized into a purer form of the evil that has been festering inside the Republican Party. This "Tea Party," despite the cute-sounding, vaguely historically-minded name, is literally a modern-day analog to Nazism. Do you know why Godwin's Law exists? On the surface, it's because invoking the Nazis is the equivalent of going nuclear in an argument: There's no way to escalate farther, and no way to compromise. It's an irreconcilable impasse, and a gravely offensive one. But underneath all of that is the premise that such a maneuver is not in itself illegitimate (for the Nazis really happened, and our world is perfectly capable of such obscenity), but that its misuse impairs our ability to respond to the real thing when it should next arise.
This is it. The Tea Party is a suitable vessel for Nazism in our time. (Less severely, but still catastrophically, it is also a suitable vessel for a terrorist movement.) Everything I detest in right-wing politics is in there, and most of what I detest in politics generally is in there too. These people are in a hateful frenzy, they are armed (!), their sense of reality has been completely distorted, their respect for self-determination in others is nil, and they have disavowed most of the cultural precepts that have functioned to stabilize and preserve our society. (That's a fancy way of saying that their loyalty to conservatism has superseded their patriotism, their love of community, their respect for the rule of law, and other key social glues which bind disparate peoples together.) People who would move so freely are dangerous even when they're right. When they're wrong, it's a nightmare in waiting. If the Tea Partiers actually gain power in these or future elections, there is at least an outside chance that they would try to make good on some of what they believe. And the Tea Party, Truthordeal, is not the party of disaffected moderates. They're ultraconservatives. They only even bother to try and cloak themselves in the mantle of moderateness (howsoever poorly) because they feel constrained. They feel society would not allow them to speak what is truly on their minds--and what is on their minds is the result of years of insinuations and denunciations by right-wing leaders of all politics to the left of Oklahoma. These people, if it were up to them, would not simply outlaw abortion: They would put on trial doctors who have performed it in the past, judges who have upheld it, and activists who have supported it. They would imprison females who seek it out unlawfully. And any of these moves, except, quizzically, for the last one, would instigate a constitutional crisis. But that's just abortion. The Tea Party has radical positions on everything.
My stern hope is that this is as bad as it gets. I have reason to be optimistic. Up to this point, the Tea Party has grown in influence by exploiting our national complacency toward serious domestic threats. For outsiders, their rhetoric has not matched reality: They're talking the talk, but not walking the walk. They're still in the realm of "safe crazy." Few outsiders feel personally threatened by the Tea Party. And why should they? National stability--and this is a stable nation--is extremely difficult to overcome, and previous fringe movements which made it this far have broken themselves against the institutional momentum of our national character. For now, the Tea Partiers are still afraid of the law. They don't respect it, but they fear it, and fear works very well to put a damper on people's behavior. Terrorism from the Tea Party is still firmly on the fringe. Perhaps that's because the Tea Partiers enjoy a high level of material comfort in their lives, making them less likely to be willing to sacrifice their standard of living on ideological grounds. They understand that if they go murder an reproductive health doctor, they themselves will go to jail for life. And what they don't understand, but which is equally true, is that further radicalization would soon meet with stiff resistance from the corporate establishment, which stands to lose profits in an environment of domestic social upheaval. These obstacles would be very difficult to surmount, and even the attempt would require a great deal more courage and risk than what the Tea Partiers have presently shown themselves to be willing to put out. So, why, indeed, not be complacent?
And thus we have arrived at where we are today. The nation's complacency, for all its apparent justifiability, is sorely obsolete. The situation is very bad and very dangerous, right now, this hour. This is the DEFCON 3 stuff. We have, in our midst, a vibrant and growing political movement that would destroy life as we know it. The Tea Party, scion of the Patriot Movement and other winger cults of yore, has arrived at a defining moment. Will they fade out, or will they catch on? The rhetoric is at maximum. The emotion is at maximum. So the question is, what happens next?
You question the Tea Party's commitment to bigotry, to tyranny. Assuming you're not just trying to be argumentative, perhaps your doubt is because the Tea Party rhetoric has assumed the mantle of liberty and claims to be a moral cause. You're a conservative yourself and you want to think yourself generally pointing in the right direction on things, and the Tea Party is conservative. You probably even know people who are in it. Well, Truthordeal, you can be forgiven. The Tea Part has fooled smarter people than you. And inside that twisted reality of theirs, it's all true. They're mavericks and patriots who want to save the country from evil. Would you expect them to say anything else? What do you think people consider themselves to be when they support and live under a government of chains?
Or maybe you haven't been fooled by their words, but still don't comprehend the magnitude of the threat. Maybe you think America is too stable and prosperous to be at risk from within. And if this Tea Party fizzles out--which it likely will--you'll of course dismiss the threat as having never existed at all, except in the minds of liberals like me. If it doesn't fizzle out, you're a ripe candidate to be absorbed by them. Of course, if that happens, if a crisis emerges and you're forced to take sides, your conservatism and your extreme propensity to accept authority would lead you, almost certainly, to become one of the chosen. You'll never think back to our conversations; you'll never see yourself as having been wrong, because you will have changed your own views to justify the Tea Party rather than vilify it--and that's assuming you're not sympathetic to the Tea Party already, which for all I know you may well be.
Whatever the source of your doubt, just go and ask the Tea Partiers what they would do if they were in power. I wouldn't expect them to give you an accurate answer, because they almost certainly don't appreciate how power can change one's sense of perspective, but even their honest-yet-wrong answers will give you an insight into some of the premises inherent in their ideology. Should gays be able to keep their children? Should atheists be banned from voting? Should females be punished for premarital sex? You're going to find, horrifyingly, a lot of "yes" replies to questions like those. That's because of the logical implications. If a homosexual can keep custody of their children, then one must accept that a homosexual is able to raise a good family. If an atheist can vote, they can vote themselves into office. If a female can have premarital sex, then marriage and traditional gender roles aren't so important after all. Tea Partiers will never accept ideas like these. From their bigotry, tyranny would follow. It is the way politics works. Bigotry never results in a freer society.
"Crash the Tea Party" is a nonentity. I might oppose them if they were going up against something like The Weather Channel. But the Tea Party is a menace. The Tea Partiers are not nice people. They're playing dirty and they're using every tool at their disposal to advance themselves. Such people can only be resisted in kind. You are wrong to direct so much scorn at Crash the Tea Party, and so little at the Tea Party itself.
