Palin hagiographer Matt Continetti thinks that if they weren’t in the pocket of Big Fin, Republicans would be “the people’s party”:
That would be a shame, because tacitly backing Wall Street on this issue erodes the GOP brand as the People’s Party.
It wasn’t so long ago that calling anything the “people’s” meant that thing was very far to the left, the People’s Republic of Cambridge, People’s Park, National People’s Radio (as a winger acquaintance of mine bitched NPR should be called), etc.
It doesn’t surprise me much that teatards have reclaimed the word, but it does seem to mean something different when they use it:
On the stage, I saw the great populist leader himself: Grover Norquist, who, after getting two Harvard degrees, developed his common-touch lobbying for the tropical island paradise of the Seychelles. Norquist spoke from a lectern bearing a Tea Party emblem and a simple message: “The people speak.”
[….]One of Norquist’s rallying cries to the crowd summed it up nicely: “Leave our earnings alone!”
[…..]The wealth advantage of the Tea Partiers helps to explain the rather un-populist message emanating from Freedom Plaza: Tax the wealthy less and the poor more.
I don’t trust any of the polls about teabaggers because I think the group is too loosely defined, so I don’t know if it’s true that teabaggers tend to have above average incomes. I certainly didn’t see a lot of BMWs in the parking lot when I went to check out the Palin book signing.
In any case, that wouldn’t explain why mildly upper-middle class people would care so much about taxes on the very wealthy.
But I think this does: the very wealthy are generally white. That’s what “people’s” means here, too, it means white non-immigrants.
If the tables are ever turned and Republicans decide they have to fight some tax cut on the super wealthy, you know exactly how they’ll do it: strapping young bucks buying Cristal with their tax rebate.
Comrade Jake
When was their “brand” the “people’s party”, exactly? These people really do live in bizarro-world.
Some Guy
Polls track identification, not participation. Those at rallies might well be over-representing the angry white working class and middle-class conservatives who are highly motivated by racial/”socialist” threats. The more wealthy identified members may share that sense of threat but are more motivated by their income. Anti-taxation is a nice catch-all hot button for them to form around.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of self-identified teabaggers attend rallies.
Linda Featheringill
Just a little bit on a tangent –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sachs-regulators-civil-charges
Article on investment banks and how they interacted with British Finance. Tucked in close to the end of the article is the idea that the Lib-Dems [who have been bitterly complaining about banks] just got lucky because of the Goldman-Sachs indictment.
Hoocoodanode?
mcd410x
Uh, so why don’t we turn it around on them and start saying they’re trying to turn us into the “People’s Republic of America?”
Fucking Commies.
Niques
You know who else deliberately stole the term “the people’s . . .” for its propaganda usage (as in “the people’s car”)?
Just sayin’.
mcd410x
Does anyone outside of the elitist northeast celebrate Patriot’s Day?
Mike Kay
@Comrade Jake:
When George Wallace ran in 1968.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZ4G251WR4
Notice how Wallace uses “people” in his ad.
JK
Dave Weigel on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal yesterday discussing the teabaggers
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/04/17/WJE/A/31944/David+Weigel+Washington+Post+Right+Now+Blogger.aspx
Bnut
I’ve had several blue collar friends who truly believe that when taxes go up on the rich, it will be taken out in vengeance on the lower classes by the richers. They would rather pay more taxes themselves and just leave the sleeping bear alone.
Uloborus
You guys and your ‘it’s all about race’. It’s all about paranoia and tribalism. Race is just one part of that tribalism. ‘They’ are in power. ‘They’ will punish ‘Us’. You can define those two terms however you like, but the cleanest, most obvious definition here is that ‘They’ are Democrats/Liberals, and ‘Us’ are Republicans/Conservatives/Real Merkins – since that’s the power shift that happened.
‘We’ don’t have to be able to see and explain the way these tax hikes are aimed at ‘Us’. It’s obvious that ‘They’ are trying to punish ‘Us’.
Unfortunately, it’s the same kind of magical ‘it’s got to be true!’ thinking that made Progressiver-Than-Thous hate the HCR bill. Somehow, in some way, it had to be a trap, right? Anyone who tells you otherwise is naive. Well, same with Teabaggers.
Linda Featheringill
The “People’s Party”:
Hey! Fatcats are people too! :-)
But Matt Continetti might have a point in that siding with the big investment banks/firms would alienate a whole lot of people.
I wonder how the Republicans will try to wriggle out of supporting financial reform – and if they will be successful.
robertdsc
@Niques:
Very smooth. Kudos.
Linda Featheringill
@mcd410x: Dunno. Never heard of anyone observing Patriot Day. When is it?
mistermix
Matt Continetti is like 25 years old yet he’s already the hack of all hacks. I wonder what he’ll be like in a few years.
WereBear
@Bnut: That’s some kind of learned helplessness.
In other news, if I had wheels, I’d be a tea cart.
Niques
@Linda Featheringill: April 19th?
matoko_chan
It should be easy to define the teabagger demographic.
One question.
Do you consider yourself a christian or not?
I suspect the Tea Party is homogeneous on selfdeclared christianity.
There are liberal christians and conservative christians in america….Obama is a liberal christian for example. So you can be an American christian and not be in the Tea Party, but I think if you are in the tea party…..you are near certain to be a christian.
The identity of the Tea Party isn’t racial……it is religious.
That is what all the Constitutional originalist interpretation is about…..a wished-for return to the time when the electorate was all conservative christians.
All the “Obama is raping liberty, Obama is shredding the constitution” bullshytt.
The Constitution is WAI (working as intended).
But it reflects the selfgovernance of a different completely electorate than the electorate of 2 1/2 centuries ago.
That is why the teapartiers are irrational about opposing large government while supporting medicare and medicaid and medicare D.
That is why the teapartiers are irrational about promoting illiberal policies while screaming about liberty and personal freedom.
It is because the tea party is uniformly religious—a conservative christian demographic, not a political or racial demographic at all.
The Tea Party is a religious sect….it is a movement based on conservative christian grievance politics.
Bob K
I think the word “people” tends to be associated with communist and socialist ideology. Somehow I just can’t imagine Grover Norquist standing behind a sign saying “The Peasants Speak” and be taken seriously. The tea party people and the rich both know what they’re talking about when you wink and say “I want MY country back” or “The Sheriff is near” or whatever is painted on the sign they’re holding.
cut & paste from the lexicon:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
burnspbesq
No one outside Massachusetts celebrates Patriots Day.
It exists primarily to allow Boston office workers to watch the Boston Marathon and a Sawx game.
However, given that it coincides with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, expect the more unhinged tea baggers to co-opt and pervert it beyond recognition. They might be smart enough not to say it when there is a camera or a microphone around, but McVeigh is a hero to those dickheads.
Memory
Actually, it’s a term used to describe European conservative parties in the postwar era. Parties of the right in continental Europe with a religious base are called Volksparteien (e.g. Austria’s OeVP, whose name literally translates to “Austrian People’s Party). These parties evolved mass electoral appeals by copying the organizational techniques of the Social Democrats after WWII had undermined far-right nationalism as a basis for conservative political organization.
Think about it this way: fascism and communism had each succeeded in delegitimizing the far right and far left of the political spectrum, and paternalistic, religiously inspired appeals served as the locus around which postwar conservatism could organize. The term “Volk” in this context definitely does not have the same connotation as the Communist use of “People’s;” in fact, it is deployed precisely to counter the claims of the left to represent the people by redefining national community in cultural rather than class terms. This cultural definition relates to Romantic ideas about national identity and ordered community with rural, religious roots.
Interestingly, the origins of the modern use of the term are actually racial and have strong authoritarian overtones (e.g. th use by the Nazis of terms like “Volksgemeinschaft” or Poeple’s Community), but it wasn’t considered acceptable to emphasize that aspect after WWII. Many urban, educated, left-wing Austrians refer to rural religious traditions, music, or cultural kitsch as “Volkisch” in a rather contemptuous way.
So the use of this term by conservatives as a basis for mobilizing against left wing opponents running as champions of the poor and disadvantaged is not a new phenomenon. The need to identify cultural community as a basis of mass solidarity because one would lose on economic issues generates interesting rhetoric and policies. It will be fascinating to see if this rhetorical tactic catches on in the United States.
HRA
@mcd410x: @3
You said exactly what I was thinking.
@matoko_chan: @16
I agree.
burnspbesq
@matoko_chan:
Sorry, but no. Your specification is over-inclusive. There are millions of Christians (including, but not limited to, me) who are appalled by the baggers.
There is a distinction between Christians and Christianists (Andrew’s term) that must be understood and kept in mind. And Christ would have a great deal of difficulty finding any of his teachings in the mindset of the average bagger.
demo woman
The right certainly knows how to confuse folks…”The People’s Party”, The Fair Tax”. It’s as though they think their base won’t fact check.
WereBear
That’s the scary part. How in the name of humanity the possibility can be entertained at all represents a freakish level of mental disengagement.
I suspect that by the end of the century, “Republican” will be a DSM VII diagnosis.
At least, I hope so.
Remfin
While worrying about loose definitions causing issues in mislabeling the group is certainly fair Doug, I think it’s also fair to remember something else:
Tea Party turnout blows…or maybe it sucks. Can something blow and suck? I saw a blog post (with accompanying news items, which I actually read!) about a single immigration march in a single city that probably had more (unique) participants than have shown up to all Tea Party functions combined.
If there is any justification to the coverage the Tea Party gets it is due to a belief that they represent a “silent majority”; the semi-respectable numbers that show up under these loose definitions are the only thing supporting that. If you tighten the definition, you end up with numbers akin to the people protesting the government putting fluoride in their drinking water.
Niques
@demo woman: It’s textbook Orwellian “newspeak”.
I am perpetually amazed that the GOP has taken a book that was written essentially as a warning, and turned it into a script.
flukebucket
Maybe I am blinded to many of the national Tea Party aspects because I am Georgia born and bred but take my word for it down here it is “ni**er in the White House” that drives these people.
It is their opinion that the reason our taxes are so high is that “we” are supporting sorry ni**ers and feeding illegal mexicans.
Down here all of the Tea Party guys will vote Republican. They always have and they always will.
And they will be as quite as church mice as soon as there is a white, male Republican back in the White House.
Personally I would love to see them scream and cry and tear their garments until 2020 or later.
matoko_chan
“There are millions of Christians (including, but not limited to, me) who are appalled by the baggers.”
yes, but you are a liberal christian, like Obama.
I don’t think YOU would describe them as christian…that is how they describe themselves.
Like I said, you can be a christian and not be in the Tea Party, but if you are in Tea Party you are sure to be a selfdescribed christian.
Think of a Venn diagram….the Tea Party is wholly contained as a simple subset(non fuzzy) of American christianity.
The Tea Party movement is actually a conservative christian grievance movement.
Liberal christians do not attend Tea Parties.
The signifier, the marker that defines the entire Tea Party Movement is self-identified christians….except for singleton outlier Allahpundit….does he count?
;)
The Unified Force Theory of Tea Party Jesus.
Linda Featheringill
@Niques: Tomorrow! Well, I guess it is not a big deal around here.
What do you do on Patriots Day? Picnics, parades, speeches, an extra glass of beer?
Boudica
@Niques: Why not? The movie Wall Street was supposed to be a warning and they turned it into a how-to handbook as well.
rootless-e
I only read this because of the “Hoot-Smally” tag. I demand a refund.
Niques
@Linda Featheringill: My comment was meant as snark, until burnspbesq (#22) pointed out that it does, indeed, coincide with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. I had no idea.
So, in answer, I would say yes . . . an extra beer or vodka or whatever would definitely be in order.
Nellcote
@Niques:
I want my language back!
Violet
@flukebucket:
If someone like Colin Powell or Condi Rice, or any other black Republican, ran and won the Presidency, do you think the teabaggers would freak out like they are now? I don’t think an African American would run/win as a Republican at this point, but I sort of wonder about it.
I think the Republicans would be boasting about how non-racist they are, but underneath it all there would still be a fair amount of “s/he’s okay, but [random white male] would be better” attitudes. They don’t just want the Republicans to win. They want a white man to win.
Niques
@Nellcote:
FTW!
Bob K
@burnspbesq:
In McVeigh’s wiki I found out that he chose that day because it was the second annivesary of the Siege of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, TX 4/19/93 – Mcveigh actually drove to Waco to express his support. If you look at the calendar you’ll see 4/19 as the start of the Amer. Revolution in 1775 – Anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Mcveigh was executed 6/11/01 – three months to the day prior to some other whack jobs blowing up some other buildings.
hal
I will not be shocked if it turns out the Teabagger movement isn’t vastly overblown by the MSM, all part of their attempt to appear impartial of course, making people think there is some vast movement affront that never really manifests.
I’m not nearly as worried about midterms as some people because of this, but I admit I could just be in denial. Of well, wake me up in November.
Niques
@Bob K: And now there’s a planned armed teabagger march on Washington tomorrow (in celebration?)
Nice.
Pangloss
Aren’t the Teabaggers really just a bunch of people who decided they had to follow around the Black guy who just walked into the store?
Skepticat
@burnspbesq: Maine also celebrates Patriot’s Day. Probably because we once were all one, big, happy state.
However, I notice that there’s now a drive to call September 11 “Patriot” Day.
The Truffle
The Milbank article brings to mind a favorite saying: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
kay
@hal:
I don’t know either. I’m relying on anecdote. Here in Ohio, I found out yesterday, people are requesting an early vote Dem ballot in the primary at 52% compared to 48% for Republicans. We have closed primaries, you have to declare if you want to vote in a primary. Now, that lead makes sense, Democrats made huge gains in “registered Democrats” in 2006 and again in 2008. There are more Democrats. But. If you pull a Democratic ballot in the primary, you’re 1. voting for the Democrat in the general and 2. voting in the general.
The fact is, they’re asking for Democratic ballots at 52% to 48%, and it’s a midterm primary. I don’t even know if that’s a “good lead”. I just know it’s verifiable fact and it’s actually happening, so not a poll.
demo woman
@Violet: In 1999/2000 Powell’s name was floated as being a possible candidate for Presidency. The right wing leaked info that his wife took anti-depressants. I can’t remember the entire article but it was obvious that the repubs did not want him to run.
WereBear
September 17th is Citizenship Day.
I’m not surprised they don’t know that.
Joey Maloney
@mistermix: He’ll be like Grover Norquist. Unless someone drags him into the bathroom and drowns him in the bathtub while he’s still small enough.
monkeyboy
If I were a teabagger with a chip on my shoulder because some in the Liberal media have been calling the teabaggers lower income and uneducated idiots, and somebody asked me in an opinion survey about my income and education, I WOULD PROBABLY INFLATE THEM.
kay
@monkeyboy:
I think a lot of people inflate income. I also think they lie about 1. how much they drink, and 2. how much they exercise.
Ain’t no way so many Americans are exercising thirty minutes three times a week, with our obesity and disease stats. Sorry. Not happening. I don’t even blame them. They know the right answer! Pick me! Pick me! “Three beers” is practically a law enforcement legend, as far as lies go. Why always “three”? People love “three”.
GregB
I nominate renaming of 9/11 to Bush’s Mulligan Day or Republican Mardi Gras.
After watching the GOP/tea party lunacy is there any doubt that 9/11 on a Democrat’s watch would have resulted in armed mobs storming the White House and a GOP emergency session of Congress to impeach the President?
licensed to kill time
__
Only tangentially related: saw some sports news this morning of basketball guys in Bucks jerseys and my mind immediately filled in “strapping young”.
Oh, Balloon Juice, what have you done to me? :-O
rootless-e
Just a reminder of why the Greenwald/Hamsher/Defeat axis does not have much respect from some of us.
https://balloon-juice.com/2010/02/15/hyping-wing-nut-spin-over-at-the-gos/
The Moar You Know
@matoko_chan: You’d be very, very surprised. The only people I know who have gone to Tea Party functions are (all three of them) all atheists. But they were Bush or Paul voters and would rather chop their hands off then vote for a Democrat.
Are they outliers? To an extent. But there is a component to the movement that does not comprise “the usual suspects”. A lot of the Paultards are joining the movement, for example, and they are not religiously motivated at all.
People want a simple explanation for teabaggery. I don’t think it exists.
birthmarker
Also, Hitler’s birthday is April 20th, and Columbine was on April 20th. I think I’ll stay home and clean for a couple of days!
Mike in NC
I liked Milbank’s term about the “angry affluent”. Perhaps “angry affluent assholes” is more to the point, based on the few teatards I know. Selfish jerks, one and all.
Davis X. Machina
@Memory: I never do ‘This’ posts, but This.
We’re on the ‘farce’ leg of ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.
rootless-e
@The Moar You Know: “People want a simple explanation for teabaggery. I don’t think it exists. ”
Of course it exists:
Davis X. Machina
@Skepticat:
I would prefer a national day of mourning on the 12th of December. Historians will point to those events as by far the worse blow to the Republic.
The Moar You Know
@Violet: Look at the below-the-radar jihad being waged against Michael Steele. Of course they would. Blacks always have been, and probably always will be, the “other” in Western societies, and the fact that one of the soon-to-be-majority “other” is in charge is scaring these people to death.
People become teabaggers for a lot of different reasons, but they all do have one common denominator – fear of change.
licensed to kill time
Maybe the teabaggers new slogan should be “Power to the Teaple”
Geeno
I believe Rhode Island (and Providence Plantations) celebrates a similar holiday later in the summer – Founders’ Day, I think.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
I think they wouldn’t freak out quite as badly if a house ni**er were to win, but it just isn’t going to happen. The only way a Powell or Rice could become President under the current Republican party is to be in the cabinet when some disaster wiped out the President, VP, Speaker, and President Pro Tem. The Republican party, as currently constituted, would tear itself apart before nominating an African American, and the rump party that remained couldn’t win the election with a third party candidate drawing away the racist vote.
dagon
the rank of file of the Tea-Partiers are NOT highly educated or wealthy (trust me, i’ve been to a few rallies, most recently the one held in Chicago).
by and large, they are old, white, baseball cap wearing blue-collar workers, small businessmen or burnt-out old cranks like that one aunt that you never want to be around at holiday gatherings.
no, the money men are their handlers and their enablers. sure, there are many elites who share some their views but they aren’t the ones doing the heavy lifting and wetting their pants everytime Bachmann or Palin hit the stage.
just look at the optics from any rally. seriously, just go to YouTube and pick one.
peace
El Cid
The Peoples’ Revolutionary Bourgeois Front for Capitalism and God.
Bnut
Since they are all rich old people who long for the CSA, I think the “Earl Grays” would be better.
licensed to kill time
The People’s Angry Inch.
El Cid
@Bnut: Very very good.
El Cid
Actually, since the Chinese Communist Party voted to include capitalists as members of the Chinese Communist Party, and since they looooove shopping at or pretending to love Wal-Mart, they who locate their production in China, can we just call them the ChiComs?
Ruckus
Aren’t the teatards the same folks as the moral majority?
Game plan – give the group a catchy name that has some kind of tie to the stated goal of the group, get the few who you can manipulate to join, gin up the whole thing in the media, and you have a mandate.
That’s been the rethug game for a long time. It has of course worked a couple of times in the last few decades, much to our detriment.
matoko_chan
Moar, you mistake me.
I think a statistically significant supermajority would SELF DESCRIBE as Christians. There may be a few atheists, but those atheists don’t make a peep in public.
Have you seen any “god is ded” signage at rallies?
What do you think would happen if a Paultard hoisted a a “god is dead” sign?
A lynching?
If a movement is homogeneous on a religion, then they are not political.
The Tea Parties are a uniformly self-declared religious sect.
matoko_chan
….and they self-describe as christians i betcha.
;)
the common denominator is a professed belief in Tea Party Jesus.
Anne Laurie
@mcd410x:
The Cheney Regency tried to hijack September 11 as the Repub-friendly ‘Patriots Day’, but the tradition of Revolutionary War memorials & re-enactments remains strong here in Massachusetts where it all started.
Wile E. Quixote
@rootless-e:
There’s also George Wallace’s explanation for his political success.
I don’t know who posted it and my Balloon Juice search-fu is weak but a few weeks back someone posted an item that had originally been posted on a motorcycling website that was an absolutely brilliant explanation of the psychology of the teabaggers. A lot of this shit isn’t new, we saw it back during the 1990s when the right-wingers were saying that Hilary Clinton and Janet Reno killed Vince Foster after a crazed night of meth-fueled strap-on savagery and that Bill Clinton funded his re-election by laundering the money he made as the cocaine king of Arkansas through the White House travel office and Whitewater development, but the fact that the president is black has amped up the crazy way over the levels it was at during the 1990s.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
This sounds like one of those idiotic counterfactuals that Harry S. Turtledove uses as the basis for his idiotic counterfactual novels. “What if the Confederate Army got AK47s?” [1]. “Hey, what if the Vikings had Jet Plane Fleets?”. “What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly? Would it have affected the outcome of World War 2?” [2] “What if frogs had pockets? Would they carry .38s and not get eaten by snakes?” [3]. “What if the Republicans weren’t in the pockets of big finance, would they be the people’s party?” [4].
[1] Actually I thought that Guns of the South was pretty good.
[2] This is one of the funniest SNL sketches ever, [5] and I can’t find it, or the “What if Superman’s rocket had landed in the Third Reich?” sketch anywhere on the internet. Leaving me to wonder exactly what good the internet is for besides Balloon Juice and pornography.[6]
[3] My dad always says this.
[4] I’ve decided to start using footnotes instead of run-on sentences and parenthetical phrases that contain run-on sentences in my posts. I’m hoping that the increased degree of erudition this reveals will get me a gig on CNN like Erick Erickson’s.
[5] Does anyone else think that SNL would be a lot funnier if we just started feeding the cast huge amounts of cocaine again? It worked pretty well for a few years in the 1970s.
[6] Not that there’s anything wrong with Balloon Juice or pornography. Well except for that time they were combined with that weird link that showed a human arm growing out of Pamela Anderson’s hoo-hoo.
matoko_chan
The reason the crazipants is so extreme this time, is that the pendulum is nevah swinging back.
Grouped minorities have achieved electoral parity with non-hispanic cauc conservative christians.
And the informed demographics are on the rise….college-educated, web-savy (geeks) and youth.
The Web info-tsunami forces a kind of baptism by fire on n/e one above the IQ gradient of consensus supernatural belief….like Cole an’ me….Douthat is below the gradient, for example.
:)
This is their last chance to use the racebaiting and IQbaiting that have served them so well in the past.
And they are simply DOA in 2012.
Scroll up.