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On the Tea Party "Movement"
Apr. 21st, 2010 11:09 amI watched an interview with one of the "founders" of the Tea-Party movement on The Daily Show last night. It was interesting. Firstly Jon Stewart went pretty easy on him. I'm not entirely sure why, except perhaps that the guy was extremely young and earnest, and probably a true believer. Getting agressive on him would have been not unlike kicking a puppy.
What I came away with was an overwhelming sense of the hollowness of the Tea Party as a movement and the vacuum of intellectual reasoning at the heart of it. The guy was 25, meaning he was barely out of college when he and his friends came up with the idea. He's probably had that horrible feeling you get the first time you are paid and see nasty taxes reducing what you thought you'd be getting.
I wonder if he was living at home at the time?
I wonder if he had or has had to actually pay for the actual price of anything?
What I'm trying to actually grasp is what it is that the Tea Party movement actually wants? It's terribly easy to talk about "smaller" or "less" government until you actually have to work out what it is you want less of, and how you handle the actual economic and social impact of what you're proposing.
Letting banks and car companies fail makes great rhetoric if you're not the one who has to deal with the shut down of the ATM networking - something I think we came within 72 hours of in 2008. GM, Chrysler and Chevy *should* have been shut down because they build bad product - but the reality is you can't let that happen because of the knock on consequences.
It feels like the Tea Party is a movement of teenagers, at least emotionally. They live in their parent's house, have lots of things they don't think about because Mum and Dad are looking after them in the background and get really really emotional when they're asked to pay something towards the rent and tidy their rooms occasionally.
In other words it's a movement without a heart and soul. And the problem with movements like that is they're open to being taken over by those that have a vision.
What I came away with was an overwhelming sense of the hollowness of the Tea Party as a movement and the vacuum of intellectual reasoning at the heart of it. The guy was 25, meaning he was barely out of college when he and his friends came up with the idea. He's probably had that horrible feeling you get the first time you are paid and see nasty taxes reducing what you thought you'd be getting.
I wonder if he was living at home at the time?
I wonder if he had or has had to actually pay for the actual price of anything?
What I'm trying to actually grasp is what it is that the Tea Party movement actually wants? It's terribly easy to talk about "smaller" or "less" government until you actually have to work out what it is you want less of, and how you handle the actual economic and social impact of what you're proposing.
Letting banks and car companies fail makes great rhetoric if you're not the one who has to deal with the shut down of the ATM networking - something I think we came within 72 hours of in 2008. GM, Chrysler and Chevy *should* have been shut down because they build bad product - but the reality is you can't let that happen because of the knock on consequences.
It feels like the Tea Party is a movement of teenagers, at least emotionally. They live in their parent's house, have lots of things they don't think about because Mum and Dad are looking after them in the background and get really really emotional when they're asked to pay something towards the rent and tidy their rooms occasionally.
In other words it's a movement without a heart and soul. And the problem with movements like that is they're open to being taken over by those that have a vision.
