The Tea Party Movement was a surprise to nearly everyone, especially to the people who set it loose. It began in mundane fashion. A far-right interest group funded by the Koch brothers initiated protests in the wake of the Obama inauguration and coordinated coverage of the events with Fox News. The protests almost immediately took on a life of their own and Dr. Frankenstein has been struggling to steer the monster ever since.
Occupy Wall Street started out as just another protest. Activists with the Canadian leftist publisher Adbusters planned to stage an "occupation" of the Chase Plaza in New York's financial district to express the usual outrage at greed, capitalism, injustice and... whatever. Bring your own puppets and guitars. No mimes, please.
Adbusters had barely completed their cool poster for the event when they lost control.
Both groups' popularity followed a similar arc, gaining broad initial sympathy which steadily hardened into the usual partisan ruts. Where the two groups differ most starkly is in the impact they've experienced.
Occupy Wall Street is little more than a footnote, having failed to wield any noticeable influence in democratic politics. The effort never got past "the opportunity to air societal grievances as carnival." Its brand was deftly co-opted by the establishment left. They adopted its cool slogan while relegating the OWS figures themselves to the Island of misfit activists where they sit stewing in their fetid tents.
The Tea Party, on the other hand, spread through the Republican biosphere like the zombie virus from The Walking Dead. Why would a party dominated by a conservative ideology -- an ideology that values tradition, business interests, and slow, organic change be so much more vulnerable to a small corps of dedicated wingnuts than a party packed with leftists, environmentalists, vegetarians, university professors and elitist snobs who ride the subway?
Although generally more fragmented and undisciplined than Republicans, why are Democrats more successful at containing the influence of their wildest activists? What is the origin of the crazy gap between the parties and will the gap ever close?
Expanding wealth and personal freedom are eroding the social capital institutions that once served, among other things, to moderate our politics. This is a national, perhaps even global phenomenon that affects both of our political parties.
What has set Democratic politics apart from the dynamics of the Republican Party is their lingering domination by two major forces of the old order -- unions and black churches. Both unions and the churches are crumbling right along with the other pillars of our social capital infrastructure, but for a variety of reasons their influence is waning at a slower pace than many other institutions.
The unions in particular have a purpose, revenue stream and membership base independent of (though overlapping with) the Democratic Party. Though their membership is in steady decline, it remains massive in grassroots political terms, easily the largest organized block in American politics. It has a tight leadership structure capable of disciplining its ranks and its interests are relatively broad compared to groups like the Sierra Club or National Right to Life. It was unions in particular that hijacked the momentum of the Occupy Movement from the anarchists and career protestors that got it started.
The black churches have a similar profile. Their numbers are much smaller than the unions, but their discipline and geographic concentration give them a unique capacity to cultivate local power. Their interests are much broader than racial justice leaving them, like the unions, open to appeals to pragmatism. They are more driven by community interests than ideological agendas.
Though Democrats draw electoral support from a motley coalition ranging from affluent progressives to socially conservative blue-collar workers, it's the unions and black churches that comprise the core of the party's ground game. A quarter of Democratic convention delegates in 2008 were union members -- 10 percent from teachers' unions alone. Another quarter of the delegates were African American (compared to 1.5 percent at the RNC).
Republicans have no similar organizational firewalls. There are two forces that wield nationwide, multi-interest influence inside the Republican Party. The most important is the loose network of fundamentalist churches and their satellites. They are the only interest that can mobilize a national force of grassroots volunteers for conservatives. The modern GOP is dominant where they are numerous and weak where they are thin.
Unlike the unions, the religious right is fragmented, undisciplined and disorganized. Their disinterest in reason and their fascination with the end of the world make it tough to dissuade them from pointless and destructive policies. It is difficult to mobilize them politically through any means beyond escalating extremist rhetoric and appeals to fear.
The other force on the right is a small cadre of wealthy donors, mostly business and industrial elites. They dominate the donor base, but their influence at the grassroots is weak and declining. They find themselves in an escalating cycle of spending more to achieve less. With the exception of the Koch brothers and a few other odd characters, they are relatively pragmatic, but they are at the mercy of religious extremists on the ground that they are increasingly unable to contain.
Neither group is in a position to blunt the extremes. The religious wing doesn't want to and the business wing can't. Without some institutional base to provide a moderating influence on the grassroots and with the local networks of social capital drying up, the Republican Party is becoming a dangerous, though immensely entertaining catastrophe.
With both unions and black churches in steady decline, how long can Democrats hold off similar assaults from their irrational left flank? It's impossible to say, but we can be confident that the tipping point is approaching. What will our politics look like when we're forced to choose between a Tea Party candidate in a Ben Franklin costume and an OWS faux-anarchist with an iPhone in his raised fist?
If Republican leaders offered sane, responsible leadership, it would go something like this: "Sorry folks, the GOP is a failed experiment. Go home. Vote Democrat. And for heaven's sake, quit playing dress-up in public." Instead they try to ramp up the most irrational impulses of the remaining faithful, and will do so for as long as they are able.
My guess at your interesting question is... the balance in the Democratic party will come from the Women and Hispanic voters who the GOP scares The heck out of with their myopic policies. As well as any one who sees fairness and shared contribution as a value. If the Democratic party can keep them through good policy the GOP may stay as irrational as its right flank for along time
And now with their idiotic "personhood laws", they are making a direct attack against birth control. Those of us responsible enough to limit our family size to what we can afford are supposed to just suck it up and have however many children that come?
The Republican Party offers nothing to those of us who don't run a corporation, earn millions of dollars, or have to worry about offshore accounts and capital gains. We are the retirees, the bakers, the teachers, the bus drivers, the truckers, the small business owners........we are the people.
So basically, any conservatives who are troubled by the irresponsible extremism of the Tea Party need to shut up and get in line? Not gonna do it.
"why don't you explain why your view of what the party should be is better, more efficacious, or more principled than theirs?"
Whole blog devoted to that: http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/. Enjoy at your leisure.
Indeed, his tunnel vision looks narrowly to winning elections, while accepting the shifted political middle over the last 75 years as established and acceptable fact.
This unprincipled acceptance also leads him to decry those who reject this shift as nutjobs, loonies, etc., which, of course, endears him to the left, because they brook no questioning of the hegemony of the social democratic state they have been incrementally constructing since FDR - with the help of Republican accommodationists, like Ladd.
However, for all of the seeming complexity of American politics, the entire subject can be condensed down to a few sentences with little or no loss of generality - starting with FDR and the New Deal - which has left us with only two competing political ideologies - collectivism and freedom.
Under the influence of the New Deal, the first of these led to the tyranny of our big government social democratic state, whereas freedom steadfastly rejects both collectivism and the ever bigger social democratic state it inexorably creates as ever more power accrues in government.
Contrary to Ladd's assertions, the Tea Party is the ONLY voice of freedom in America today, while Ladd and his ilk constitute our current crop of accommodationists whose only ambition is to win elections.
If anything, Ladd should be a Social Democrat Precinct Committeeman.
These collectivists, and Social Democrats, and accommodationists, are hiding all over the place. Look who else is backing the "tyranny of our big government":
"To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances, or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require sanitary arrangements is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services – so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields."
- from The Road to Serfdom
The author, Frederick Hayek was a pioneering Libertarian economist. Apparently he was also a closet Socialist. Hard to know who to trust anymore.
Your comment is absent, amusing, and ironic – in the fact that I am NOT a Tea Party member, but just one of millions in the parade of unconditional supporters of their cause.
This writer can point out the motes in both our eyes.
As a Dem , I can say that our problem is not Reps...it is fear.
For one side it is fear of people of color , fear of knowledge , fear of change , fear of some mythical all-powerful entity and his minions who threaten an eternity in hell if you do not do what he (they)say.
For the other side...well , our fears are being daily justified by the Zimmermans , the Kochs , the Bushes , the Ailes' , the Brewers , the Arpaios....
Sorry. As much as I appreciate reading a republican being even-handed , I cannot believe anything will change the modern republican party other than annihilation at the polls. If , that is , the DOJ declares all these voter-suppression laws illegal.
The Treyvon Martin tragedy inspired Black churches across the nation to pledge to register one million voters on Easter Sunday. More than that, the congregations pledged also to get those people to the polls, and to make sure that they had whatever ID their particular state was requesting. From what I've heard, they've come close to meeting that goal, and plan to continue the drive. Also, on Easter Sunday here in Orlando, two mega churches, First Baptist of Orlando and The Hope Church held a service at our Amway Center. Almost 18000 people came together for this multiracial protest against racial divisiveness and the perception after the Treyvon killing that Orlando was a city divided by racial lines, rather than a group united to see justice for everyone, and to decry Republicans' seeming indifference to what happened.
On the left, continuation of the corporate campaign financing could eliminate the anarchists; or a major breakthrough in renewable energy production could shift us to a center-left position where the anarchist-types are just a little too far off the path for normal acceptance.
Ideal world? Fundamentalist split, followed within a short time by corporate finance offloading. Eliminate both the fringe right radical side - then the energy breakthroughs and put us into a place where the fringes on both sides become small minority players. We'd have what, 30 or 40 years of relative peace before the cycle repeats.
Because Liberals tend to be more reason-based in their thinking than the emotional and more violent conservatives (NRA, pro-war, pro-death penalty, KKK, belief in American exceptionalism, more prone to have prejudices).