Yet.
My pet theory is that part of it is sour grapes. A lot of lefties, that might be the counterpart to the Tea Party, are upset that the Tea Party is getting such incredible press now, when they got theirs during the '60s. In the '60s, the establishment didn’t support or court them, and now, the establishment is actively trying to woo the vocal minority, and getting massive amounts of attention for it.
Damn Baby Boomers…they already had their 15 minutes! Who gets two 15 minutes?!
That’s what I’m saying. In any case, their activism has atrophied a touch*. Activism is like a muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it, and you have to use it on a regular basis to keep it strong. There’s a lot of the Old Guard that are used to doing things the Old Way here where I live, and there’s also the establishment getting in the way of activists, too.
*Obvious overstatement.
Going by Strauss and Howe’s generational-archetype scheme, and the apparent age of most people attending the events, I would say the TP movement’s generational base is partly in the Boomers, but mainly in the Silent Generation (would also be in the GI Generation, except that so few of those remain alive and capable of speech in this year of grace).
Maybe then they won’t be outvoted 40-60 in the Senate 
The absence of a mass movement on the left is a depressing fact about contemporary American politics. During the Great Depression we had the labor movement. This was to the left of Franklin Roosevelt, but it supported him, and pulled him to the left.
Currently millions of Americans face long term unemployment. The message of the Tea Party movement is that the government should do nothing to help them: it opposes unemployment compensation; it opposes stimulus packages; it certainly opposes efforts by the government to hire the unemployed directly.
During the War in Vietnam there was a backlash against the anti war movement, the new left, and the hippie movement. I keep hoping there will be a backlash against the Tea Party movement, but so far it does not seem like there is one.
I think the Tea Party movement is evil. If it prevails the unemployed are going to start dying. :mad::eek:
I would attack the unemployed, first by shelling their homes, and then, when they run out into the street, mowing them down with machine-gun fire. And then, releasing the vultures.
I realize these views are unpopular, but I have never courted popularity.
The Tea Party has come nowhere close to doing the damage to this country that the anti-war movement, the new left, and the hippie movement have. There isn’t the slightest comparison between the two.
Of course you think this. People like you think that anytime conservatives get their way people are going to start dying. And in the meantime you completely ignore - and deny if confronted with - the deaths and human misery caused by drugs, drive-by shootings and gangland acitivity, and criminals released over and over again because of liberal concerns over overcrowding and a resentment of and reaction to what it regards as the punitive attitudes of the right when it comes to sentencing.
Millions of people have died in this country over the last forty years as a direct result of liberal permissiveness and policies, and millions more have been and are condemned to lives of deprivation and crime due to having been raised in the huge number of single-parent homes which are also a direct result of the new left and the hippie movement.
It was the conservative element in this country that embraced drug use as though drugs were manna from heaven; it wasn’t the conservatives in this country who created the revolving-door prison system we have now; and it wasn’t conservatives in this country who decided that you didn’t need “a piece of paper to legitimize your love” while at the same time encouraging bed-hopping.
Millions more people have died or had their lives ruined as a direct result of liberals making things “better” in this country over the last forty years than ever have as a result of conservative beliefs, which are generally in direct opposition to each of these.
Is there a second verse to Starving Artist’s same old (OOOOOLD) song or are they all the same as the first?
Yes, it was – not as something to use personally, but as something to use politically, and with a bottomless cynicism no murderous drug baron could match.
According to its adherents, the Tea Party has been around, what, a year or two?
Give it time, give it time…
Dammit! :dubious:
But, those things have done no damage to this country. The Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution were long overdue. Drug abuse is nothing you can blame on any “movement.” The hippies mostly, eventually, rejoined mainstream society and got conventional jobs – the remainder of them who still live like hippies are no social revolutionaries, and no threat to anything in any other way. And for Og’s and “Bob”'s, sake, what “damage” did the anti-war movement ever do?! They didn’t even manage to stop the war! (Nixon/Ford ended it in their own time for their own reasons long after the movement had peaked.)
People sometimes call holdover hippies “fossils” – but are they any more fossilized than persons who still obsess with them as enemies, in this day and age?
As for the New Left, if you look closely you’ll see it was the sort of “leftist” movement that America’s corporate power structure could well abide, as it emphasized cultural issues, not economic, and posed no real threat to their power or assets.
New survey finds the Tea Party is religious-right, not Libertarian.
I would say that adds immense weight to the “generationally time-limited” theory.
Which factor does not, however, diminish any impact the TP movement may have on the coming midterms.
I’m saying that from the ground, though, in the trenches of the fun business of politics and activism. We’ll be fine here, but in other places, it may be messy until people wake up.
So, does anybody have any fresh thoughts on this as eday draws nearer? What will be the Tea Party’s overall effect on the midterms? Will the GOP do better or worse than if the TP did not exist? On the one hand you have the “enthusiasm gap,” OTOH you have TP no-hopers like O’Donnell spoiling the GOP’s shot at seats it had a good chance of picking up this year.
Fun fact: The Villages has the highest incidence of herpes of any community in Florida.