There is a hope though: Scott Brown and other moderate Republicans may be joined by Mark Kirk, Meg Whitman, and others to form a centrist faction of the Republican Party.
As long as you’re here, why don’t you drop back into your “Your Endorsements 2010” thread"?
Actually, Obama, of all people, stuck us with Scary Jan. Bastard.
By the way, are there any polls out there on the effects of a Tea Party Republican nominee on the choices of Democrats or liberals in the general election? Because, personally, it doesn’t matter much to me whether a Republican is plain or teabagger–it won’t affect my voting because on all the big issues they are the same.
Different TP groups have come out with different manifestos. But certainly seems that all of them are climate change deniers and social conservatives.
In fact, the aforementioned NPR series included a debate between the head of some social conservative network and a TP organizer. While the TP organizer acknowledged that social conservatism was common among TPers, she insisted that the focus was on cutting taxes and decreasing government. The social conservative’s reply? 80 to 90% of TPers also support social conservative policies, and the TP needs to not be libertarian on social issues if it wants to keep these people in.
Besides, look at the actual candidates that the TP has fielded–almost all are not just radical, but unfit for office: Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, etc. Probably because the TP is more prone to leader-worship (Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin) than they like to admit.
Wow. Except for #8 & #9, those are all reasons I would vote against them. #5 isn’t that bad, except that I don’t know how this commission will be appointed & whether to trust their judgment. Whose judgment of constitutionality will be used? Will this be the real constitution, or the magic imaginary “all that is not required is forbidden” Divine Constitution? Even if we were to get officers in the commission that understand what the constitution is & is not, I worry more about their possible judgments of which functions would be “better performed” by states & localities. That can be an excuse to cut programs for fiscal reasons & have them not done at all; see our rotting infrastructure today.
Don’t worry about it. A right-populist movement prone to leader-worship? What could go wrong with that?
This confused me too, but they’re saying they don’t want economic incentives to control emissions. “by” isn’t modifying “Stop” but “control.” Of course it’s written ambiguously enough to allow people who want economic incentives to control CO2 emissions to claim that it’s for them.
If its base is in the rural provinces of the country, & it embraces both the concepts of Kulturkampf & Kampfkultur, that is distressingly familiar, whether “right” or “left.”
I forgot to add that this silliness about “assessing Constitutionality” seems to me an outgrowth of a legal culture where the courts are expected to define laws as “unconstitutional” & thus void them when passed.
Legislatures are there to legislate. The Bill of Rights & the common-law tradition are supposed to put simple minimal restrictions on that function. But the Constitution has been mythologized & built up–on both sides of the aisle–to the point that now the simple fact of the function is not recognized.
Nah, that’s just an unintended ambiguity on their part. Find me a single teabagger who doesn’t think global warming is a myth.
Yeah, this precept is both strange and likely unconstitutional itself. If the legislature started deciding which laws are constitutional and which are not, it would intrude upon the powers delegated to the judicial branch. Tellingly, TPers always yells about protecting the constitution, but only for certain things–and they never actually cite the legal precedent that would support their position. Deeming something “unconstitutional” now merely means, “I oppose it.”
That sounds like a recipe for Communism.
What’s more likely to happen with the current Republican Party climate is that Brown and the ladies from Maine (the only real remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) are going to be primaried from the right by batshit crazies like O’Donnell, Angle and Paladino. Brown is already in bad odor with the Repubs for crossing the aisle once or twice. Don’t you know that’s treason for a Republican now?
I believe you’re too pessimistic. Angle and O’Donnell will lose (I’d say 60% and 75% chances respectively) and Mark Kirk, Meg Whitman, and perhaps others will be elected. Obviously anyone who believes in 2+2=4 will see the basic logic of this-Paul and Rubio might be elected but Angle and O’Donnell is pushing it.
Uhm…you do know Meg Whitman is not a candidate for the US Senate right? She’s buying, I mean running for governor of California. Did you perhaps mean Carly Fiorina?
To be fair, it’s easy to see how one could confuse the two. Both are wealthy CEOs with vanity campaigns.
Okay, here’s one poll I found that challenges the “Tea Party is a libertarian movement” idea:
Okay, so maybe they want the government to create jobs by “getting out of the way,” but then why do they want the government to limit executive bonuses? Why do only 10% consider the VA socialist, when it’s one of the truly socialist programs in the U.S.? Why does a majority consider SS socialist, yet almost half does not want it privatized?
Why do Palin and Joe Miller, who come from the only state in the union with what can be called socialist policies (redistribution of oil profits to all citizens), espouse the kind of mythic rugged individualism found only in Ayn Rand novels and 19th century Westerns?
I think that the TP is best characterized as raw anger and resentment (sometimes justified, sometimes born of bigotry) that has adopted the mantle of libertarianism for its anti-establishment and contrarian edge, but really has little philosophical foundation. They have been fed the great lie, over the past 30 years, that government is always the problem. So, it is only natural that they are in a state of cognitive dissonance and end up supporting the government programs they are familiar with while denouncing federal intervention.
IOW, all these attempts to tease out some guiding principle of the TP are necessarily fruitless. It’s just a mass of people who sense that they have been betrayed by their government but whose ideology, long cultivated by the right, precludes them from seeing the tight nexus between the wealthy and government.
During the Great Depression, one working class Southerner remarked that he would vote for anyone who punished the Wall St tycoons, whether it was the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan. This same kind of rage and confusion has re-emerged, only they cannot denounce capitalism as such because years of propaganda by conservative think tanks has made devotion to the free market axiomatic. Hence, you have this apparent incongruity of the TP championing capitalism while demanding that the government limit Wall St executive pay.
The Tea Party is all about branding above policy. People want to vote for the “conservatives who’ll kick ass & take names” but simply project what they want to imagine the policy is. There’s little awareness of what a serious policy debate or position would look like. It’s really the culmination of GOP politics to this point & indeed of two-party politics in general.
I believe that what is guiding the Tea Party is a desire (to paraphrase Wm. F. Buckley) to stand athwart government and yell “STOP!”
This is why the TP appears disorganized, projects no particular agenda, has no platform and nothing in particular in the way of legislative goals. It simply wants to stop the growth and reach of government, and, eventually, to shrink it.
People like O’Donnell appear very much ready to do battle in trying to achieve this goal, and that’s why they’re winning primaries. From the voters’ point of view, it isn’t so much about what they’ll try to accomplish in terms of creating new programs, and it isn’t about what they’ll try to accomplish in terms of outlawing ‘teh gay’ and masturbation - it’s about what they’ll try to do to reduce the size and scope of government.
It’ll be interesting to see if this sentiment prevails among mainstream conservative voters come election time. I have a hard time imagining that most of the country’s conservative voters will either stay at home or vote for Democrats rather than for Tea Party candidates, who, despite their lack of political gravitas, are impassioned to fight against the ever-increasing size and scope of government. But maybe they will. We’ll see.
No meant I meant in general moderate Republicans being elected.