It seems to me that the Tea Party was essentially about keeping things as conservative as possible, and punishing Republican politicians who were perceived as being RINOs or not conservative/right-wing enough. In other words, “Be conservative or else!”
Given that one common complaint among liberals is that many Democrats aren’t liberal enough, do you think there might ever arise some equivalent movement arising among the left wing - namely, a movement that would try to pull the Democratic Party towards the left, and punish centrist Democrats by voting them out in the primaries for not being liberal enough?
Edit: Sorry, I ended up putting two question marks in my thread title rather than one. Not trying to sound sensationalist.
Doubt it. The left, such as it is, is fractured into small chunks that view each other with suspicion. They can get together and agree on hot button social topics that don’t threaten power, or hating Team Red, but other than that it’s not even clear what the “liberal view” is on many issues. Circular firing squad is the default mode.
Every once in awhile there’s a movie with huge internet buzz, but ends up flopping at the box office. I think there’s a similar effect with online activism. Online you can convince yourself the thing you care about is much more important and widely seen as such than it really is.
Another problem for a lot of lib causes: there’s no money in it. Defense, the drug war, health insurance, and energy are huge sectors of the economy. When you see someone talking about getting rid of the inefficiencies of private healthcare or taking an axe to the military industrial complex they’re talking about getting rid of a ton of jobs with no alternative. You see movement where you can get the big hitters on your side – net neutrality is a thing because of tech companies. I could see something similar with UHC. Companies might demand it to stay competitive in a global market and get rid of the paperwork hassle.
One area I don’t understand is why the rest of the economic actors haven’t banded together and ganged up on Wall Street for fucking everything up. I can understand why activists can’t do anything to move the levers of powers, they’re plebs afterall, but a lot of powerful people were hurt too. I’d think they’d want a more stable market. Is Wall Street more powerful than everyone else? Or maybe the economy is just that financialized. People still talk fondly of the Clinton economy and that was based on a huge bubble. Guess everyone can just enjoy the next one while it lasts.
If you are to predict a liberal equivalent of a right wing movement you may as well accurately describe that right wing movement. The Tea Party is essentially conservative or right wing on tax and spend issues and relatively libertarian leaning on social issues. If a similar movement was to occur with liberals/Demcrats its possibly going to be along the same lines, or perhaps the the opposite lines. Smaller government liberals aggressively advocating progressive social causes(unlike the Tea Party for which social issues are of secondary importance), or big government proponents espousing traditional values. It’s more likely to be the former.
The above is not meant as my definitive view. A movement may well spring up along far different lines. The above are just a couple of possibilities.
Ever is a long time. Saying “no” means making categorical statements about the year 35943, which is stupid. Of course it could happen: it has happened, on a small scale, as Joe Lieberman can attest.
I suspect a *successful *effort along those lines won’t happen on a large scale anytime soon, though, for reasons marshmallow covered in his first paragraph. The Democrats are a collection of interest groups, and have a harder time articulating what their ideology is. All republicans, at least rhetorically, claim to favor small government, so it’s easy for an insurgent group to form that aims to hold them to it.
Emphasis added. The mainstream media is full of false equivalences: they would have you believe that both parties suffer from exactly the same problem at exactly the same time and that they are mirror images of one another. Smart readers should either believe in fantastic coincidences or run the other way and find a more adult source of information.
In actuality the amount of crazy in each party ebbs and flows. Republicans are near peak-crazy right now, but the go back to the pre-Reagan era and the Dems had plenty of that precious fluid on tap.
To be more specific, slivers of lefties regularly try to pull the Dems to the left by running third party campaigns and the like. Lieberman was primaried out in 2006. Now this is nothing like what’s happening in the Republican Party, where staunch conservatives like Lugar and Bob Bennett lost to Tea Partying wackadoodles and debt ceiling deadbeats. But methinks that day too will come for the Dems. But not any time soon.
Not true at all: most Republicans favor big Defense, big CIA/National Security agencies, big police, big prisons…
And surprisingly few of them want to gut Social Security and Medicare (Medicare of course being socialized medicine…).
I think many want to but won’t say it aloud. It would be political suicide.
The problem is that a lot of liberalism is anti-populist. I can see a liberal movement of working class people that demands “economic justice” and is anti-Wall Street, but such a movement would probably also be anti-immigration, anti-enviromentalism(at least where there’s an economic cost to environmental policies), and Jacksonian in its foreign policy views.
In other words, a liberal movement that looks a lot like the old New Deal coalition.
As long as the GOP remains batshit crazy the overriding feeling is going to stay “holy shit, we need to keep those nutjobs out of power”. Maybe once things start approaching sanity on the right you will see a push to the left by liberal fractions.
Hence the function of the phrase “at least rhetorically” in the sentence you quoted.
The establishment pubs are all * rhetorically* in favor of smaller government, though they never actually succeed and don’t even seem to be trying all that hard. This discrepancy is a major impetus behind the tea party.
There’s a common opinion, and in my view incorrect, that Wall Street consists solely of envelope pushers who don’t actually do anything except periodically wreck the economy (which makes them money, somehow). The fact is, most businesses depend on investment banks when they need money or want financial products or services (for example, an airline may want to purchase oil futures to hedge against the risk of oil prices increasing in the future). Companies also depend on banks if they want to acquire smaller companies, spin off a division, or do any number of things. There’s also the fact that economic cycles are innate to capitalism and predate investment banking, so its not like they can be gotten rid of.
True. We usually see liberalism collapse into factionalism when they aren’t under threat of being removed from power. As long as the country remains evenly divided liberals will stick together more often than not, although issues like the Keystone pipeline continue to cause friction between the Democrats’ traditional base and their ideological base.
It certainly doesn’t seem that way to me – the Tea Party (in general) and their supporters (especially their most prominent supporters, elected and non-elected) seems as Christianist, or more so, than the Republican party at large.
I just don’t think the Keystone pipeline is as big as deal as either side makes it out to be and will be forgotten in a couple weeks once its settled. Until there is a spill that is.
I think both sides are prominent in the movement. The elected officials are probably more socially conservative than Tea Party voters and members in general. Though its worth noting both have an ideological overlap which lessens this glaring difference between both wings. Heres a link to a survey of Tea Party supporters at its Virginia convention. Im not saying its a definitive survey but its probably broadly accurate.
http://reason.com/poll/2011/09/26/is-half-the-tea-part-libertart
“The recent Reason-Rupe poll also finds two groups among those who self-identify as supporters of the Tea Party, with 41 percent leaning-libertarian and 59 percent socially conservative. Tea Partiers generally agree on economic issues and abstract role of government questions. However, a split emerges on whether government has a role in promoting traditional values in society or if the government should not promote any particular set of values.”
Lord, yes. When changes to one medical policy (removal of actinic keritoses, IIRC) were made in the mid-90s, there were protestors outside the Medicare offices in Florida.
If Medicare were gutted…can’t imagine the calls and letters the politicos would get.
I have never yet heard any Tea Partier say anything that could be so construed.
I dunno about that. There was not so much factionalism among liberals (among Democrats yes, among liberals no) during the decades from FDR to Nixon, when New Deal liberalism was generally accepted as the default-consensus position in American politics, and anti-New-Deal conservatives were outliers and cranks.
. . . does not even include liberals. Which are not the same thing as progressives/social democrats, let alone socialists.