The "Tea Party" Does Not Exist. It has no members, leaders, headquarters, budget ....

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Mon Nov-08-10 12:42 PM
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The "Tea Party" Does Not Exist. It has no members, leaders, headquarters, budget ....

The Tea Party is not new, or coherent. It's merely old whine in new bottles This incoherent group has no leaders, no policies, no headquarters. It is held together by Fox TV and big money
by Gary Younge
November 8, 2010

The "Tea Party" does not exist. It has no members, leaders, office bearers, headquarters, policies, participatory structures, budget or representatives. The Tea Party is shorthand for a broad, shallow sentiment about low taxes and small government shared by loosely affiliated, somewhat like-minded people. That doesn't mean the right isn't resurgent. It is. But the forces driving its political energy are not those that underpinned its recent electoral success.

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. It's simply a new name for an old phenomenon - the American hard right. Over the last two years the term has provided a rallying point for a coalition of disparate groups, most of which have been around for many years. Minutemen (anti-immigrant vigilantes), birthers (who deny that Obama was born in the US), Promise Keepers (Conservative Christian men), Oath Keepers (military and police, retired and current, who vow to resist unconstitutional government "by any means necessary"), Fox News watchers, Glenn Beck lovers and Rush Limbaugh listeners who had no unifying identity before.

Having a name helps. It has offered a political identity to a significant number of people who were either not active or might not have understood themselves to be in any way connected. That name has helped reorient the stated priorities of the right away from social issues and towards fiscal ones. But this is no more than the old whine in new bottles.

Most of the characters now closely associated with the Tea Party are not new to rightwing politics. They have just moved from the margins to the mainstream. Sharron Angle, the failed Senate candidate from Nevada, has held state office since 1998. While in the 42-member state assembly she voted no so often on consensual matters that such votes were sometimes referred to as "41-to-Angle". The much-maligned Delaware Tea Party candidate, Christine O'Donnell, stood unopposed in the Republican primary in 2008 before going on to challenge Joe Biden. These people didn't join the Tea Party, the "Tea Party" term attached itself to them.

Research conducted over several months by the Washington Post to contact every Tea Party group in the country found that many did not exist. Seventy per cent said they had not been involved in a political event in a year - a year in which the Tea Party was credited with transforming the nation's politics.

"When a group lists themselves on our website, that's a group," Mark Meckler, a founding member of the Tea Party Patriots, told the Post. "That group could be one person, it could be 10 people, it could come in and out of existence - we don't know."

Read the full article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/07/tea-party-old-whine-new-bottles