All posts tagged "Teabaggers"

[rebelmouse-image 24749935 original_size="203x152" expand=1]Andrew Leonard has a piece up at Salon about the gold standard and the people who obsess over it. It's amusing, but his read on why people obsess over the gold standard is, I believe, somewhat off.

One of the most evocative examples of how media bias towards novelty works in politics has to be the way that mainstream media is covering the teabagger movement. Any fool could see from the outset that the teabaggers are a bunch of Fox News-addled right wing nuts that are sore losers whose anger is exacerbated by racist resentments. But the mainstream media insists on covering it like it's an exciting, fresh shift in the political landscape. I don't think they're carrying Republican water on this issue, though. I think the eagerness to run with this "teabaggers are fed-up independents" narrative is stoked by a desire for novelty above all other things. But it defies common sense. You can look with your own eyes and see that the teabaggers aren't really a collection of spring chickens. But should your eyes deceive you, then you should also note a) that the average age of Limbaugh and Fox News' audience is past retirement age and b) that enough of them were so far out of the loop, slang-wise, that they initially called themselves "teabaggers" without realizing how that would cause a nation to titter wildly. The point here is not to bash old people, but to point out that human beings aren't known for our willingness to change our habits and beliefs suddenly in our golden years. It happens, of course, but it's rare enough that if you see a big group of people with an average age older than 40, you can safely assume they didn't all just wake up to their brand-new political beliefs. The far more likely explanation is that the people you're seeing have been nursing their grievances for a long ass time, and were activated by some flagrant violation of long-held beliefs. My money's on the most obvious explanation. There was a one-two hit of shit happening they thought would never happen: a black man elected President and the passage of health care reform.

It's the question on the minds of those of us who've been alarmed watching the teabaggers give up all pretense of civility (not that they had much) in the run-up to the health care reform vote in the House. Now that it looks likely that we'll actually get health care reform, the question is what will the teabaggers do with all that anger? While the fact that the world not end cause them to run out of juice and go home to stew while listening to Rush and Glenn? Or will get they get uglier and more violent? It's clear that some Republican politicians see the latter as the preferable option, presumably because they think it improves their electoral prospects. Witness Steve King playing footsie with violence and secession: (It's the first 3 minutes of the video).

J. Patrick Coolican, writing for the Las Vegas Sun, a fairly good overview of how the current teabaggers fit into a long tradition of ignorant, paranoid right wing nuttery. The John Birch Society never went away in American politics. It just morphs with the times and ascends whenever the hated enemies of the paranoid right---mainly the cosmopolitan elite and non-white people---are perceived as gaining ground in the U.S. One thing to keep in mind about the teabaggers and all previous incarnations is that their claims to populism should not let you assume they are generally working class people voting against their own interests. Voters who made under $50,000 a year voted for Obama and only when you start to get over that does it tip into McCain voters. Granted, firmly middle class people would be wiser to vote for Democrats instead of Republicans, and so you can argue that white middle class voters who mainly broke for McCain are voting their resentments over their interests. But that's beside the point. The main point here is that the stereotype that teabaggers are somehow downscale economically simply because they squawk about the liberal elite is untrue. The struggle against the cosmopolitan elite is more of a cultural issue---the McMansion owners vs. the condo dwellers. For teabaggers, the main problem with the "liberal elite" is that they take their privileges and share them with people teabaggers deem unworthy, both by supporting liberal policies that further racial and gender equality and by living those values by allowing non-white people and women into the club, instead of moving out to the far exurbs the second that a black family moves on to the block. If you don't understand the racist and sexist motivations of teabaggers, they really never will make sense, but if you take it as a given, most of their choices and resentments make sense, even if they're technically still illogical. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin epitomize the paranoid right: they're well-off, highly privileged people who sneer at people who use the same kinds of privileges to broaden their worldview, from traveling to eating funny food to buying into the idea that American democracy is about treating all citizens as equals.

There was a lot of discussion and debate on the blogs about what exactly the teabaggers were hoping to accomplish with their protests. Then I discover this wingnut blogger linking back to us and he wrote: