I don’t think that’s accurate. http://theweek.com/article/index/202620/the-evolution-of-the-word-tea-bagger says that they sent tea bags to people and had signs referencing “teabagging”, but nothing like “we’re all Teabaggers” or “you should call us the Teabaggers”. That appears to have started with MSNBC and spread to the rest of the media. I think it’s pretty clear that many of them would prefer to be called something like “Tea Partiers” and never embraced the label “Teabagger”.
Thanks for the clarification.
I’d rather wear tie-dye than tricorn hats.
They originated the name before somebody told them what it meant.
Where? When? The only references I’ve found were to performing the act on people they don’t like. That’s pretty good evidence that they knew what it meant. They didn’t call themselves “Teabaggers”. MSNBC did.
I’ve been calling them Teapers lately, but my question remains: When did hippies ever have as large an influence of the Democratic Party as the Teapers now do regarding the Republican Party?
It’s typically Teahadist to feel that if anyone but you has a voice, then your voice will not be heard.
It’s often expressed in First Amendment terms: intolerance is defended as free expression, whether it’s in the form of speech, action, or policy.
They created the verb form. Griff Jenkins, FOX News, March, 2009.
Would the facts really matter? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu0UYvVm0yY
And yes, MSNBC did call them teabaggers. That is what they called themselves. The Youtube video clearly shows that they adopted teabags as their icon. Some of their signs also clearly show that some of them thought “teabag” was a derogatory thing to do.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/05/a_peoples_history_of_teabag.html
So yes, tea bags and “tea bag Nancy Pelosi” were symbols and slogans devised by the people who now deny they did exactly that. They pretty clearly did not understand that this would result in them being called “tea baggers” by people who knew what it meant and laughing at them for their ignorance. And that is the real snark being directed their way: that they are uninformed and ignorant.
I might say the Tea Party is more comparable to the Democratic Party from about 1968 to 1992 when they constantly nominated tired out liberal suits (men like McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis) until they wised up and nominated Bill Clinton.
Perhaps a nearer equivalent would be the radical-by-American-standards New Left of the time, the Students for a Democratic Society et al, that eventually mutated and gave birth to the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army – but, those were not hippies; the hippie counterculture really was not very political-activist at all. Both sets might have joined in the same Vietnam-War protest marches – sometimes – but they were very different groups.
Not terribly hippie.
Well, had, in many if not most cases.
And would be dead by now without their Social Security and Medicare.
The “swing back” towards Conservatism took place in the 80s. By the 90s, we were over the tipping point into something new, & quite frankly, flatly crazy.
The Yuppies were the opposite of Hippies.
Iraq War protesters were the hippies of the '00s. Tea baggers and Occupiers are the hippies of the '10s.
But seriously. hippies were mostly anti-political. Real hippies lived in communes and stayed out of the square community. Of course, if you think every 60s teenager with shaggy hair and bell-bottoms was a hippy, that means all those gelled up Limp Bizkit fans in black wife-beaters and iris-hiding contacts were the hippies of the 00s.
Even more seriously, it doesn’t make any sense to compare several-generations-apart social movements like that. The entire world was different. The place in society that the hippies occupied doesn’t even exist anymore. Come up with your own counterculture, man.
But definitely not the Tea Party’s.
I think a lot of people are confusing the extremnist antiwar leftists of the '60s with hippies…
Despite the demographic differences, I get what the OP is saying and have often thought the same thing.
I don’t know how much of an indication of the times it is, but I’m definitely seeing more right-wing expats than before over here. Except for maybe some of the retired servicemen, it used to be pretty much overwhelmingly left-wing-ish expats you’d see if not outright hippies. There are some flat-out Tea Partiers here now.
“Peace” was the centerpiece ideal in the otherwise apolitical hippie philosophy from what I understand, and they were anti-war by and large IMO.
You know who the hippies of today are? The hippies. They’re still around.
No we aren’t.