So, liberals seem clueless at times. Nothing new there, but I was snooping on a discussion among liberals about the tea party, and man, they don't understand it at all. They act like it was primarily a response to Obama, that it was racist, etc. That said, as an ex conservative who left the tea party shortly after it acquired power, I felt like it would be a good idea to explain the tea party to the craplibs.
Honestly, the forces that led to the rise of the tea party aren't much different than the forces that led to the Bernie left. The fact is, after 8 years of the Bush presidency, conservatism reached a crisis point. It seemed obvious, to anyone on the right, that their ideology was failing. Bush imploded it. Bush wasn't just a bad president to liberals, by the end of his second term, he was a bad president to conservatism as well, and his brand of neoconservatism was seen as an abandonment of more traditional conservative principles. The right was full of malaise. Most people I know didn't like McCain, who ran as a third term of Bush, they just supported him because better him than a democrat. The fact is, the Iraq war wore on the right, as well as the left, and most people wanted out. But McCain ran on staying in for 100 years if he had to. No one wanted that. Bush also exploded the national debt, and as we know, the tea party's commitment to fiscal conservatism became a focal point of their appeal. The fact is, many on the right wanted a return to traditional conservatism principles based on small government and laissez faire. They wanted a more pure ideology not bogged down in the internal politics of the Bush administration. There was an atmosphere of malaise and a desire for change in the air.
My own 2008 politics reflected this. My first choice was Ron Paul. He was a libertarian who supported a return to fiscal conservatism, and his anti war isolationist foreign policy appealed to me at the time. I had strong disagreements with McCain and the establishment GOP at the time, much like I did with the dems in 2016 and 2020. I even threatened to vote for Bob Barr, the libertarian candidate, over McCain. Hell, I'd vote for HILLARY CLINTON over McCain. Seriously, this is why I later hated Hillary as a progressive. I knew she was a moderate THEN. I would have supported her THEN. I knew, based on the Clinton administration, that she would have brought fiscal responsibility and she probably would've gotten out of Iraq. Conservative me, actually preferred Hillary over McCain, in 2008. But, Obama won the primary there, and he was made out to be a radical socialist, despite their politics being similar in practice, and thinking the difference between Clinton and Obama was a lot like the gap between Clinton and Sanders, I went for McCain as a lesser evil to stop Obama.
And then obama got in, and conservative me screamed over death panels in our healthcare, and how much money he was spending, (trillions and trillions), and it just pushed me hard right. I know liberals love to point out racism against Obama and I guess in retrospect it was there, although not really in my line of thinking. While I did buy into the idea that Barack had a radical background due to his father, and association with the likes of Reverend Wright, I never really believed in that birtherism nonsense. I mean you would need to be stupid to do so. I just thought he had some marxist influences in his views and wanted massive wealth redistribution (if only...).
After McCain lost to Obama, the neocons lost all argument. Like, they just had no fight left in them. No one liked them, no one wanted them. So conservatives started planning for the future of having a more pure conservative movement that went back to its roots. While some of this was astroturfed, a lot of us really believed that stuff back then, I know I did. And through 2010 I was in a "fight the dems" mode on everything.
And then they won, and in 2011 they started governing. And you know what? They largely did what they said they would. And it started to scare me. I watched them pass abortion legislation that forced women to carry stillborn children to term. I watched as they would impede government action and shut down everything to force concessions from Obama. I watched as they advocated for cutting social services on people during a recession, while advocating for tax cuts on the rich. And it terrified me. And the worst part is, I couldn't argue this wasn't the version of what I had advocated for. This was exactly what I had advocated for. They were trying to accomplish their idea of a conservative utopia. And it terrified me so much I could no longer identify as a conservative in good faith and I became more liberal. And then the next year I became an atheist due to a bunch of parallel stuff going on, and that just accelerated my shift left as I had to rewrite my entire perception of reality from scratch.
I didn't really intend to go full on into my story there, but I guess it made sense that I did. I wanted to explain what the tea party was, as I saw it. It was a good faith movement by conservatives to revert to a more ideologically pure version of conservative ideology. Its core flaw is that...as it turns out, conservatism sucks and is no way to run a government.
And over time, these guys just got more and more extreme. They inevitably shifted toward Trumpism with the anti immigrant and more nativist crap, and with that, I honestly can say I can only presume their mindset being on the outside looking in. The fact is, I haven't had a frame of reference since 2012, but I assume many were as frustrated by stuff as I am, they just had different ideas for what things should be. They're wrong, just as the tea party was wrong, but eh, that's their value system.
I just felt like I had to explain this, because liberals don't get it. They just claim, we'll, they're neoconfederates, they're racist, this was a reaction to Obama. Obama played a part, but the hatred of Obama wasn't all racist, there was a racist component to it, but the far right seems to confuse mild neoliberal dems with the likes of my indepentarian ideology, or marxism, and they often can't differentiate between the two either because to them socialism is when government does things and redistributes wealth. And they just thought Obama was radical. Was his blackness a reason why? Well, yeah. I guess it is. The birtherism crap wouldn't have happened if the dude was white. And his perceived association with black radicals at the time might have helped differentiate him from say, Hillary Clinton. So i guess race was part of it.
The birtherism I'll make no excuse for, although let me comment on the whole reverend wright thing. Wright did have what would be deemed, by a conservative, to be radical ideas. And the logic was, if Obama was sitting in church listening to this guy for 20 years, maybe he had some of the same views. Is that really a bad assumption to make? Well, maybe, I'm just trying to explain how it wasn't really that racist in context. The fact is, the right has a hatred of all things 1960s. And a lot of radical ideas came out of the 1960s, including among rather militant black activists. And it was deemed unacceptable by the right to hold these views. These views were deemed as subversive, anti American, and Marxist. While they are a bit more accepted today, the hatred among the right for them is the same as ever.
Heck, in my own defense, this is why I believe triangulation doesn't work. You can try to convince the right that you're a moderate, and blah blah blah, but they're still gonna scream you're a radical socialist anyway. And you know what? Someone deemed a radical socialist, will still win elections. We didn't need Hillary Clinton and the moderate vote in 2008, Obama still rolled McCain and Romney despite half the country thinking he's a literal marxist. Which tells me we could probably run a Sanders or Yang type candidate and win. We just need to win over working class voters who benefit from those policies. But I digress.
The fact is, the tea party was primarily an ideological movement. And it largely was about establishing a more pure ideology. Racism was a fairly secondary concern, and with myself, it was not even an issue at all. If anything, the bernie or bust movement has a lot in common with the tea party, and while some think that's a bad thing, it isn't necessarily. Just as neoconservatism needed to go, so does establishment neoliberalism. The problem with the tea party was the people who ended up rising to prominence were the most extreme elements, akin to the "Jimmy Dore left" I took swipes at yesterday. And let me ask you, is the bernie or bust movement about racism? Not at all.
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