No, successful politics often involves doing both at once.
Why would I want progressives to spend any time trying to find compromise positions with teabaggers? They are the fringe of the right wing. Politically, it makes about as much sense as trying to find common ground with Lyndon Larouche types.
Yes, let’s find a way to dilute our position so that we gain all the strengths of affiliating with a group that’s probably less than 1% of the population? A group whose sole purpose for existing is opposition to the Obama presidency, and who will be content to disappear the next time a white Republican is elected president?
The more useful question is how progressives can better make political mileage out of the dumbassery of the teabaggers. In fact, in general what progressives need to do better is fight for a less diluted progressive message. Represent something that people need and do not have otherwise. Be leaders and people will follow.
The LEFT is incoherent?
I’d be interested to hear any direct personal accounts of Tea Party meeting attendees. Is there any contest of ideas going on?
Sam, you know all that about what the teabaggers want from attending their rallies and talking with them, right? You know better than all these pesky citers what it’s all about because, well, how exactly?
In dispute is right.
The term got it start with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Here’s a quote from Huffington post article about it:
That article was posted on April 15, 2009. I remember it well. It’s irrelevant if some random person used the term ‘tea bag’ a couple of weeks earlier in an interview no one saw - it’s entry into the popular lexicon started with Cooper’s remarks and took off from there. His exchange on CNN got a lot of media attention because of the sexual double-entendre, and the left picked it up and ran with it, as you can see from the Huffington Post quote above.
And it’s also clear that he knew damned well what ‘tea bagging’ was, as did other people on the panel. They thought they were being clever.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
You talk as if it hasn’t been tried and failed. Repeatedly. You talk as if it’s actually possible to reach common ground with people who demand ideological purity. You talk as if we should compromise with racists, homophobes religious bigots; how is doing so even moral?
Interesting. I had difficulty establishing any type of timeline in tracing usage (in the cursory search I did). So:
My first link references March 15, 2009 (as you point out as “a couple weeks earlier”) as the time that Fox “reporter” Griff Jenkins first used “teabag” as a verb in this context (quotes around “reporter” because his coverage is more cheerleading than reporting). And I have to say that I’m pretty sure that I heard the term used prior to Olbermann’s publicizing it (I didn’t know that Cooper had anything to do with it)…but that could be faulty memory on my part.
Given Jenkins’ quote, I don’t think it’s unfair to say a tea-party proponent chose the moniker for them (and thus, for themselves). At the same time, I also think that it’s now pretty clear the term has been shunned, and generally should not be used. And I say generally because I have little problem with using it as an epithet, much like I’ve heard some prominent commentators (and conservatives in real life) use the word “liberal” as an epithet.
I’m poking around for a more definitive timeline, but it’s turning out to be a hard slog. At any rate, thanks for the link about Anderson Cooper – I didn’t know that.
Well, I know it’s not possible to reach common ground with you.
Because, while their movement is partly about racism and xenophobia and a pointless and doomed culture war, it is also about economic populism. They are from a white middle/working class that feels squeezed – from outside, and from below, but also from above. That’s something with which progressives can find some common ground. Michael Lind writes:
That’s not where it started. Cooper was just riffing on what they had already been calling themselves for weeks. I remember it well. The term originated long before Cooper made that joke, and it originated witrh mailings sent out by the baggers themselves. As a matter of fact, I’m reasonably sure it was already being used on this board.
Yep It was used on this board several days before Anderson Cooper made that awesome crack.
The teabaggers came up with that term themslves. It’s too bad for them if they don’t like people calling them what they call themselves.
Didn’t the political use of “teabagging” begin as a tax protest last year? People were asked to send teabags to their Congressional Representatives and Senators as a protest. This was a reference to the Boston Tea Party in the18th Century when tea was dumped by costumed “Indians” in Boston Harbor. (Just adding this information for Canadian friends who probably know it anyway.)
They unfortunately called themselves “The Teabaggers” which led to many suppressed grins on news programs and other outright puns such as Anderson Cooper’s. Priceless.
You know what? I stand corrected. You were right. I was wrong.
And, it makes the use of it by the left more acceptable. You have a point.
So during the 1980s we didn’t witness an alliance of sorts between certain radical feminist and religious conservatives on the issue of pornography?
Dear God in Heaven, Sam and Dio just agreed on something. Relatively amicably.
I am urgent need of a well-stocked fallout shelter capable of keeping 4 people alive for however long Ragnarok is going to last. Anybody got a lead on one?
Politics often works that way. Strange bedfellows. Like Christian fundamentalists supporting Israel.
I don’t see it, BrainGlutton. While there is some common ground on economic security it just doesn’t seem possible to deprogram any significant portion of the Tea Party supporters. If they were the kind of people who engaged in critical thought they wouldn’t be supporters in the first place. A better strategy IMO would be to continue to treat them as the hopelessly wrongheaded do-nothing deadender antis that they are. And try to do a better job of educating the next generation to avoid the paranoid style in American politics.
Do you have a cite for that? I have seen figures showing that the average wage of govt workers is higher that the private sector, but that does not mean that equivalent jobs are. I know lots pf people that leave public service to work for the private sector and get substantial raises.
Besides, I suspect that only a tiny portion of govt spending is for salaries.