My memory could be off, but I recall during the first years of the teaparty’s astroturffing pundits and posters were vociferously claiming that the teaparty was some sort of third party, a political coalition made up of equal parts of Republicans and Democrats.
Is that recollection correct? If so, when did they drop the pretence and recognize the TP as a wing of the Repbulcians (the collective ‘they’, including the politico-venture capitalists funding the turfbuilding campaign, Fox News and talk radio, real media/journalists, teaparty members, posters, etc.)? Other than rumblings about splitting from the Republicans, is there any large, non-astroturfed collection of voices still insisting the TP isn’t primarily aligned with the Republicans/against whatever it is Obama/the Democrats do?
(If you absolutely must whine about my taking it for granted that the teaparty was astroturfed into existence and that Fox News/talk radio is wholly distinct from real media/journalists then consider that a poison pill that’s irrelevant to the thread and take it to the Pit.)
Pretty much right out of the gates. Sure, there were some people who weren’t ultra-conservative Republicans in the mix, but I think most of them got converted, co-opted or drive off by the loons.
Republicans by definition are against Big Government, but the Tea faction is REALLLLLLY against it. I’d compare it to the Green Party on the left… you don’t see many Republicans joining the Greens, but you might see a lot of Democrats move that way.
That said, even though they’re more or less a subset of the GOP - they also kind of hate typical Republicans nearly as much as they do Dems.
You’re right that at the very beginning some people claimed that the Tea Party was a true populist movement composed of dissidents from all sides. There may even have been some truth there, since the economic meltdown was producing protests everywhere and a lot of older Democrats were never going to identify with Occupy Wall Street.
If there is a time when any pretense disappeared I’d say it was the 2010 elections. IIRC, the Tea Party wound up backing no Democrats. Checking on Wikipedia, I see that’s accurate:
Any page on tea party history that fails to at least mention the Koch brothers or Americans for Prosperity is tantamount to a history of the Bush presidency that fails to mention Karl Rove.
So about a year and half of proclaimed independence?
I think it just appears that the Tea Party is a subset of the Republicans. In actuality, the Tea Party endorses candidates that it agrees with. They come overwhelmingly more from the Republicans than from the Democrats, so it appears that they are affiliated. I’m sure the Tea Party would be just as happy to embrace a Democrat who believed in their principals of limited government and fiscal responsibility.
Which meshes with my estimation, that by 2008 some people/groups in the Right were already disillusioned with where the NeoCons had taken the GOP in the Bush years, which had already resulted in a Democratic Congress in 2006; and were upset with the effects of the by then ongoing housing crash and the then-imminent financial crisis and aware thatthose made it likely that a Democratic White House and Congress were impending; and that these factions, even before the conventions were adjourned, had already started looking for ways to start obstructing the new Democrat administration from day one, and to issue a challenge from the hard Right to make “establishment” Republicans pay. So they were ready to pounce on the large numbers of “Movement Conservatives” who came out of Nov. 2008 feeling the maistream GOP had failed them, by telling them “Well, never mind that, it’s water under the bridge, it happened because we were not conservative enough. But look at the dire threat that’s in front of you right now, man!! Lost your job? Lost your house? Health Care Reform will make you lose your very freedom! And, war on Christmas.”
That Santelli on the floor of the CME could be said to be channelling populist sentiment is a joke. He was channelling sentiment of his particular interest segment, who would prefer to let the weak perish so the survivors could scavenge the remains cheap.
No, the original myth was their ranks were equally filled with (former) Republicans and Democrats with the core being independent voters. I think **Tim R. Mortiss’s **post kind of highlights the extent of the myth or what it’s evolved into. Like a lot of things that have mutated it’s kind a grotesque in a ‘look what happened to logic’ sort of way—kind of encapsulated in “I’m sure the Tea Party would be just as happy to embrace a Democrat who believed in their principals of limited government and fiscal responsibility.”
Yes, but the Tea Party’s principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility are “none of either”. Since Democrats generally support both limited government and fiscal responsibility, it’s going to be quite hard to find any who agree with the Tea Party.
Thisis a better account of the TP’s principles. It is a movement of “local notables” trying to protect their power and privileges from federal interference.
A more complete history was reported months ago by the ones that look at the climate change contrarians, many of them are also Tea Partiers.
Before the recent research there were already a lot of connections seen between the ones opposing the control of tobacco and the ones also opposing the control of global warming gas emissions.
Several think tanks, like the Marshall Institute and the Heartland Institute just modified their FUD playbook used for denying links with cancer and tobacco, changing some words in that book, they moved to prevent any regulation or taxation of CO2 emissions and other global warming gasses.
As part of that change of focus, the financing also increased to groups that then morphed into the Tea Party of today. It was an effort financed in large part by Tobacco people and then Fossil fuel ones because Tea Partiers can be counted on pushing an agenda of no taxation and no regulations that “coincidentally” ends up protecting the fossil fuel industry.
The hope now is that even Koch industries and others are realizing that just because the Tea Partiers opposed taxation and regulations, and they did help the bottom line of the corporations, those corporations are now distancing themselves from the current efforts of the Tea Partiers.
Seems that the powerful are **finally **noticing that helping to elect stubborn people that based their no regulation and no taxes on anti-science and ignorance can become harmful to the bottom line in the long run.
I remember when the Tea party first came out, it was portrayed as bipartisan but then some polls came out showing 80-90% of tea partiers are either republicans or independents who lean republican (which is another way of saying they are so right wing the GOP isn’t far enough right for them).
So it was likely hard to uphold the pretense with that kind of info. Which hasn’t stopped pretense in the past.
