"But let's be open-minded and assume that the vast majority of tea partiers or "tea party types" are rational, high-minded men and women who genuinely care about the future of the country."

There's a big difference between being open minded, and offering your brain to the world as a spittoon.

.
"ordinary Americans are fearful that the country they know and love ... will be unrecognizable from any European welfare state."

God, if we could ever be so lucky.

.
"the tea party ... appears to be doing the bidding of the political-corporate ruling class that has had the upper hand for decades."

Wow, if this article is news to anyone, then welcome to Earth friend... (no you may not see our leader – he's too busy fighting these tea-bagger people, who seem to really be outsmarting him lately).

–SS

The Tea Party is a new and competing Brownshirt wing of the Republicans whose current Fuhrer is Glenn Beck. The Blackshirts are the usual suspects: Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Tim Pawlenty, ad nauseum. It's all just spillikans in the parlor because these Tea Party types, once ensconced in government, will quickly toe the line and become just more totally corrupt and incompetent cogs in the wheel, dancing to the tune of Goldman Sachs and the MICC.

This round, the TP was good for picking-off democrats. For that reason, it served its purpose this election. I agree with the author, the TP has a long way to go. But the idea has promise. It worked.

Love 'em or hate 'em, the TP may have pried-open the door to some fresh & creative ideas for the citizenry to regain some of its lost leverage over the political process.

Long term however, it probably doesn't take the place of a solid, well grounded political party. Maybe thats a good thing, or maybe not... "Power corrupts, and absolute po..."

In my opinion, witnessing a few mealy-mouths, lemming*-like lying dems lose their jobs at the hands of this novel movement was a very small price to pay to see it work.

*with exception to Russ Feingold

Dear Dan Rodricks:

No, you need to make it even more simple; tea party is too many syllables.

We need 2 name changes: The RICH and the POOR parties You see, that way people could pronounce it and know exactly where they stand.

This would simplify life for everyone. Wall St.the banks, the mafia, the media , the tele-evangelists, CEOs would be the RICH
party. The rest of us would be the POOR party. Right away this is much more clear and simple, no?

It would be easy to find moles so that the dirty tricks people could be found put quite easily. Go to voter registration, and look up the address. If it's in the rich side of town, hey that's a big clue that you're dealing with a double agent!

Since 95% of the country would qualify for the POOR. party, right away, our numbers would be massive. WOW, we could see that immediately; even the blind could figure out the percentage quite easily.

We would ,at last, have common ground for a peoples' movenment. Yeah, They ( THE RICH PARTY) would label us all as socialists and commies etc. , but if they did, knowing how diverse such a huge population would be, WE could all see clearly that they were lying to ALL of us. AT THE SAME TIME

We could all meet in DC and realize that no matter how many of the RICH party showed up around the Washington Monument or the Tidal Pool OR WHEREVER, that the RICH party would only take up the same amount of space as fly poop. WE, the POOR party would be everywhere! No matter where they would be, the RICH party would be surrounded.

Hey, people of the POOR party, maybe we finally have a common cause : we're all poor, or soon to be, and in that WE can all find common ground and be truly AMERICAN at the same time. Now that the enemy is sooooo much easier to identify, Let's roll!

Why should we accept Obama's terrible TARP bailout, escalated war, record as President? This is just more Dim party apologetics. :(

PROSECUTE CLIMATE CRIMINALS: Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries

Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship funds the Tea Party. Coal Industry's Criminal Human and Environmental Devastation: http://www.democracynow.org/tags/coal

Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters [oil industry, etc.]
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/10/25

Tea Party movement influenced by corporate oil and Mormon ideology: http://www.examiner.com/x-31532-Modesto-Political-Issues-Examiner~y2010m1d25-Tea-Party-movement-influenced-by-corporate-oil-and-Mormon-ideology

In the first few months of its nationally leaderless beginnings, I don't think that what otherwise quickly became the Tea Party movement was anything but an unscripted burst of legititimate outrage by passionate but poorly informed Independents.

It seems to me that many of the people who initially started protesting against Obama's sellout of his campaign promises-- about 7-8 months into his term-- were the same moderate-to-progressive-lite Independents who'd gotten Obama elected, and who had rejected Duopoly politics during the '08 election, but who nevertheless had decided in Nov08 to take a chance on Obama-as-Sincere Reformer, despite his Democrat label.

Then quickly following (it seems to me), as O's lies and betrayals became increasingly undeniable to Independents who'd just voted for Change You Can Believe In, the Rovian-Bush Right which had just been kicked in the teeth by the general electorate, seized the obvious opportunity of discontent to infuse this loose but hot citizen energy with elitist money, elitist guidance, elitist policy definitions, and with, finally, the mass bodies of GOP rank and file (differently-but-equally-deluded) protesters.

That the TP movement almost overnight became co-opted an nothing but a new engine of the US oligarchy, it's initial goals snatched like candy from a child's hand, is by now clear enough.

What isn't clear to me is where this movement's briefly-original and disgusted Independents have now gone, or might be going in the future.

It might have been hoped that, by Nov 2010, most of these still-angry Independents had least abandoned their loyalty to the very latest co-optation of their political protest (into what now might be described as the Emerging Palin Party.

I had that hope a little bit -- until last week election results came in.

By selling out to their conservative oligarch oppressors who conditioned them to think "conservatives" are the good guys and "liberals" are the bad guys, Teabaggers deserve their ignoramus reputation.

"...but a fear that in short time our country will be unrecognizable from any European welfare state." (Attributed above to Matt Kibbe, CEO of FreedomWorks)

I suppose it would be liberal-elitist-just-not-getting-it of me to point out that this sentence, ostensibly authored by someone with a high level of education compared to what we elitists usually associate with the Tea Party hoi-polloi, if interpreted in the English language they have sworn to uphold against all others, means "from the vantage point of" any European welfare state. He meant to say "indistinguishable from..."

Some seem to think this article is conciliatory. I find it among the best I've read on the real dichotomies, er, misunderstandings.

If you are "middle class" and your house is "underwater," probably your politics didn't matter. If your 401(k) plunged in value, it probably didn't matter who you voted for. although many of us cannot find work for political reasons, most unemployed and disemployed and nonemployed in this country probably have little or no sense of the political history of labor in this country.

The success of the Tea (non)Party this past Tuesday should provide an opportunity and a lesson. It will be interesting to see how they do a mind-meld with John Boehner in the coming months.

-30-

I'm not so interested in the sell-outs getting what they deserve as in coming to understand Why otherwise half-way average people become sell-outs against their own interests in the first place -- and then: how to head-off-at-the-pass that ironic mass phenomenon.

I think we progressives have to put more analytical, and then finally, more political, energy into understanding Why and How this mass-human perversity so easily and continually gets reproduced throughout history.

The manipulable psychic red buttons of existential fear and false-security individualism in us humans are an age old horror, and a seemingly needless absurdity --but the progressives of Today aren't much smarter at preventing Today's elitists' from pushing these same buttons than the contextual progressives of 5000 years ago were.

Sociopathic humans getting their personal Just Desserts has never been the point.
Better collective understanding and preventing of individual sociopathology, always has been and remains sine qua non.

The day of reckoning for the newly elected Tea-Senators and Tea-Representatives will soon come when they will be asked to vote on real as opposed to virtual (on the campaign trail) legislation. It will be especially interesting to observe their voting on the funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan because they can then no longer hide behind their anger at Obama to avoid facing the war or peace issue.

This example may not be representative but I recently interviewed a group of 15 self-described Tea Party people as they awaited the arrival of their chosen candidate, retired colonel and Iraq war veteran Chris Gibson.

Everyone was very courteous, although one retired lady became angry when I said that I was researching distortions in the ads being run by both parties. "Both! Both?" said she, but she soon recovered her equanimity. And several others gave very polite responses to my argument that the Republican party needs moderates like the late Governor Rockefeller or President Eisenhower.

Many were retired and taking full advantage of such socialist benefits as Social Security and Medicare. One was collecting a generous NY state public employee pension won by the teachers union founded by avowed socialist Al Shanker. One younger man was unemployed and receiving a check from the government. His wife was a social worker, a job which is inevitably dependent on state, local and federal funds.

And then there was the leader, the candidate's aunt, who herded the group together as the lengthy wait for the GOP bus dragged on, and directed them in cheers for Col. Gibson: "Chris! Chris! He's our man! If he can't do it, nobody can!"

She was a very well-spoken woman and impressively educated. She told me that her nephew was "A true Renaissance man," adding that he has a "Miltonian" quality. (See John Milton, 1608-1674, author of Paradise Lost. Most probably, this very erudite tea partier was referring to his Areopagitica. As we shared reminiscenses of the late William F. Buckley, I couldn't help but wonder if she had raised the Milton parallel with the group she was leading.)

Fair disclosure: I regard the recent Republican takeover of Congress as a disaster for this country's future, but I liked all these people. Col. Gibson, who has Ph.D from Cornell, is very engaging and his aunt is quite a delightful conversationalist. But I can't quite figure out what could possibly hold together a group like this for very long. And that may be true for the whole Tea Party phenomenon.

Ralph Nader: Ten Questions for Tea Partiers
www.counterpunch.org/nader10222010.html
(scroll down)

"...ordinary Americans are fearful that the country they know and love won't be there for their children."

They _truly_ don't understand that George W. Bush has already insured that fact, with his huge tax cuts for the very richest among us and two invasions, which have profited those same people immensely, but for which nobody has yet paid. The burden of paying that debt has been left to our grandchildren.

Fact, high taxes on the richest among us will _create_ jobs.

Watch this bit on Countdown:
http//:www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40035851#40035851