Wikipedia summary of the Tea Party movement’s Effects on 2010 mid-term election cycle:
Is this more impact than you expected? Less? What will be the net Tea Party Effect on E-Day? What does this bode for 2012? In the longer term? Deeper meanings?
There was a discussion with a reporter from the National Journal on NPR this morning about the Tea Party. He had some very interesting things to say about it, such as its principle of individualism being realized in a focus on decentralization and avoidance of leaders and spokespeople. He argued that the Tea Party could only wind up in one of two situations: a permanent position in the Washington establishment, with spokespeople and so forth; or, simply fading away in the next few years.
All very fascinating topics (and much comparison could be made to the SDS in this regard), except for a few key problems:
*I do not think the Tea Party, overall, is a libertarian movement. It may have started out that way with Ron Paul in 2008, but that’s not what it is now, as a whole. It is really an intensification of most far-right Republican stances (on abortion, the government, spending, gay marriage, the war on terror, immigration, tort reform, etc.).
*there has been considerable corporate funding of the movement, particularly the millions from the Koch brothers to Americans for Prosperity.
Well, I would judge the movement’s stances – at least, its highest-priority stances – mainly from its “Contract from America”:
Note that there’s nothing about abortion or gay marriage or the War on Terror. Its focus is small-government economic-libertarian – deregulate, defund, privatize, cut taxes.
No surprise. A lot of the above – or at least moves in the same general direction – might appear beneficial to a lot of corporate interests.
Same-same.
BTW, here are two books I heard discussed on the radio in the past two days but have not read:
The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, by Will Bunch.
Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, by Kate Zernike.
The problem is that, while their candidates may adhere to these principals, most of them also bring along a lot of far-right social conservatism. You would think that, if the above-mentioned principles are the driving forces of the Tea Party movement, they’d have been able to put up and promote some conservative Democrats. But, there’s no sign that they’ve even tried to do this.
I think the number of these candidates in the upcoming midterms decreases the Republicans’ chances of taking over either house. They’ll still make gains, so the Democrats will have all of the same problems they’ve had for the last two years.
I’m more interested in what happens when the successful Tea Party candidates actually start working in Congress. Will the Republican leadership be able to maintain the party unity they’re so famous for, or will these new Congresspeople be thorns in their sides?
It is such a weird contradiction. The tea baggers identify with the Republican party. Yet who caused the deficits that they are screaming about? Who wants them to fight Obama so the rich get more money and power? Boehner and the Repubs like him, are using tea baggers to their own ends. They have convinced them they have similar needs and problems. But they are so far apart in their ends. But it is possible the baggers can weaken the Dems ,so the Repubs will be back in power. After Bush, how can the baggers make sense of that?
Bolding mine. This is how you identify the stupid people.
Would they be in favor of all Federal regulations being limited to 4,543 words?
Wouldn’t be surprised. It’s nonsensically arbitrary, but it kinda, you know, resonates.
Of course, it’s not the multiple tax brackets that make the tax code complicated in the first place: That can fit easily in a corner of a single page. It’s determining taxable income that’s complicated, and you’d still need to do that in a single-rate system.
Chronos is correct that the multiple tax brackets has really nothing to do with the complexity of the currect income tax.
“Cap and trade” is an economic incentive, isn’t it?
For that matter, can you “stop” something that hasn’t actually been started yet? And without “cap and trade” how would the government provide “economic incentives”? Certainly not in the tax code; we’ve only got 4,543 words to play with, must use them carefully.
The best outcome we can hope for is that the two major parties come to the realization that they MUST stop conducting business as usual, or face ouster from their cozy environs. The worst case scenario is that the republic suffers irreparable harm from crackpot policy-making or the blocking of necessary legislation (should they gain enough seats). We’ve seen what can happen with oddball choices before: Jesse Ventura in MN is a prime example, and California under the Governator has certainly spiraled into economic disaster.
It was my understanding that California’s problems were mostly attributable not to the Governor, but to 37 million different governors. All of the referenda passed directly by the voters hamper the professional government’s ability to do anything about problems. In particular, the referenda have put in both limitations on taxation and mandatory government spending, since high spending and low taxes are both popular taken in isolation to each other, but they’re inconsistent.
Yeah, Prop 13 that capped property taxes wreaked havoc there many years ago and is still causing problems, IIRC.
Partly, although both the governors* and legislature has used the referendum process to push unpopular policies.
In what respect? I mean, it’s fairly easy to identify what aspects of business-as-usual are infuriating the Tea Partiers, but it is much harder to identify which of those are things that can or should be changed.
In the respect that both parties engage in blocking legislation as a matter of political idealogy rather than on the basis of whether it may be good for the country. Everybody with a brain is angry at these tactics, regardless of who uses them.
I think you mean “alignment” rather than “ideology.” Blocking something for an ideological reason is perfectly consistent – in fact, arguably identical – with blocking it because you think it’s bad for the country.
And we can’t reasonably ask the Pubs to stop voting by political alignment, even when they do so in some conflict with their individual ideologies. That is simply party discipline in action, and party discipline is something of which the American political system/culture has never had enough. Better the Dems should learn some.
In any case, I don’t think excessive party discipline, nor excessive obstructionism, in Congress are among the things that are infuriating the Tea Partiers.
I think that the Dems exhibiting more party discipline would be nothing but bad for this country. If anything, the Pubs need to do less of it. All this stiff-necked behavior has done nothing but polarize the country. There is almost zero spirit of bipartisanship
in government. While this is not the sole reason for the sudden rise of the Tea Party, it’s certainly an element of it.
The tea party brought the Repubs Angle, O’Donnell, Paladino, Brewer, and others of that ilk. That is not a real big favor. If the Reubs are pleased with that group, then they have some real low standards.