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Tea Party Tanks: Latest Poll Shows New Low for Faux Grassroots Movement
Five years after helping sweep Republicans back into office, voters appear to be shedding their support for the movement once described as a "weird and disorderly mob" created to do the bidding of the corporate elite
Oct 26, 2015
According to new polling released by Gallup on Monday, national public support for the far-right Tea Party movement has plunged to historic lows.
The survey shows that only 17 percent of Americans now actively support the Tea Party, while a majority (54 percent) neither oppose nor support the faction, which has aimed to drag the Republican Party further to the right in recent years.
As Democrats and self-identified liberals continue to represent the largest set of outright opponents, the largest drop in support for the Tea Party comes from so-called "conservative Republicans," of which only 42 percent are now supportive, compared to 63 percent who described themselves as backers in 2010.
Gallup noted that the other significant drop in support was among "Republican leaners"—independent voters who lean Republican. Among those voters, support for the Tea Party dropped a dramatic twenty-nine points, from 52 percent in 2010 to 23 percent this month.
Since first appearing on the political scene in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2007 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Tea Party was primarily interpreted as a re-branding of the Republican Party after the political and economic disasters produced by the presidency of George W. Bush. Though many of its supporters spoke of it as an authentic grassroots movement fueled by conservative and independent-minded voters, observant critics--including journalists like George Monbiot and Matt Taibbi--documented how well-known members of the Republican establishment and other elite interests orchestrated its founding and political development.
Taibbi, for his part, explained the phenomenon of the Tea Party this way:
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement -- which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
Despite such criticisms, however, the undeniable energy created by the Tea Party was widely credited with Republican Party victories in the 2010 midterm election, which returned the House of Representatives to GOP control and swept right-wing governors to power in numerous states across the U.S.
The bottom line of Monday's polling, according to Gallup, is this:
Republicans made huge strides in the 2014 midterm elections, including increasing their majority in the House and gaining control of the Senate. However, the Tea Party movement that had played such a huge part in the GOP's 2010 election successes was much less visible this time around. Still, several Republicans elected to the House and Senate with Tea Party support have become major players on the national stage, including presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The Tea Party movement has also been tied to the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican members of the House who have played a key role in the current battle to select a new speaker.
While the effects of the Tea Party movement on previous elections still resonate, the big drop in support from Republicans and Republican leaners over the past four or five years may indicate that the Tea Party movement's impact on American politics is fading.
The Gallup poll on Monday was based on telephone interviews conducted between October 7-11, using a random sample of 1,015 national adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
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The Mind-Boggling Libertarian Legal Game Plan to Repeal Obamacare
Jul 23, 2014
Dave Weigel explains something that I had not fully understood before --- the Obamacare repeal legal game plan:
At least 4 million people, who signed up for Obamacare in states that chose not to set up exchanges (or in the case of Oregon, tried and failed to set up their own), are currently panicking about the threat of erased subsidies and higher payments. Why do I attribute this to libertarians? Like I wrote in 2013, and like Alec MacGillis has been writing, the Halbig case's chief advocate was Michael Cannon, a Cato Institute scholar who had previously campaigned to stop states from setting up their own exchanges.
Cannon's goal, stated bluntly and frequently, was that Obamacare had to be brought down by any means necessary. States that did not set up exchanges were in a better position to sue the government. Fewer people in the exchanges meant higher overall costs. To insurers, the "death spiral" was an apocalypse scenario; to Cannon, it meant freedom.
"A victory for the Halbig plaintiffs would not increase anyone's premiums," he wrote Monday.* "What it would do is prevent the IRS from shifting the burden of those premiums from enrollees to taxpayers. Premiums for federal-Exchange enrollees would not rise, but those enrollees would face the full cost of their 'ObamaCare' plans."
This is the Leninism I'm referring to in my headline. Cannon's no socialist--quite the opposite!--but he saw a solution to the Republican crisis of watching people grow used to new entitlements. Rip the entitlement away, weaken the system, and a painful short term would give Congress no choice but to undo the law. Take away some of the beams, and what do you know? The roof collapses.
An what "undoing" the law means in this context is removing the requirements for pre-existing conditions and the basic package of coverage --- which means that people affected will go uncovered or pay an unaffordable price for an inadequate policy. You know, like it used to be. Which in their minds was a great system apparently.
Remember, this is how they really feel about this:
Teaparty: Just Let Uninsured People Die (CNN GOP debate, Ron Paul)https://24ahead.com/s/tea-parties (Super special note for Ron Paul fans below) Teapartiers shout out "yeah!" when Wolf Blitzer ...
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Orthodoxies and Adolescents
Dec 01, 2011
One day when I was twelve years old, I told my grandmother, born in 1890 and a staunch believer in the Church of Rome, that I had doubts about the existence of God, as well as the idea that her beloved religion had a corner on the game of eternal salvation.
I knew that I was courting trouble. But even still, I wasn't prepared for what came next. This woman, who had always cooed my name with love and laughed at almost everything I said, turned to me with a look that was equal parts disgust and disdain and said very angrily: "you'll never amount to anything with ideas like that!"
This event came to mind while watching Bob Schieffer's interview of Ron Paul on Face the Nation two Sundays ago. In it, Paul tells the long-time establishment reporter that there is a strong causal link between the way we as a nation conduct ourselves overseas (bribing, bullying, invading, occupying, assassinating and destroying) and the hostility that citizens of many foreign cultures have toward us.
Upon hearing this rather unassailable fact, the supposedly objective Schieffer was, like my grandmother all those many years ago, overcome (watch the clip) by a wave of physical repugnance. And like her, he did his best during the rest of the interview to shame the libertarian candidate into hedging or renouncing his position.
Speaking of orthodoxies and thoughts that can't be broached by "serious" people in the establishment, Wednesday's New York Times reported that the growth of the British economy is stalled, and that as a result, the Cameron government is contemplating the application of still more budget cuts.
As Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and others have ceaselessly pointed out, only people lacking the most basic understanding of economics would ever engage in sweeping austerity measures in a time of economic recession/depression.
So why, after predictably failing with its first application of such measures is the British Government now talking about doing more of the same?
Because the people that control the politicians see this as their big chance to finally destroy the "aberration" of the mid 20th century welfare state, you know, the thing that delivered hundreds of millions of people into the security of the middle class.
For thirty years, the large-scale capitalists have, through their control of media, hammered home the idea that government only screws things up...and that anyone who doesn't believe this is a naive child unable to grasp how the world really works.
Key to the functioning of this campaign of indoctrination are the ideological enforcement tactics on display in the Schieffer-Paul interview. The idea is to make it very, very uncomfortable for those expressing views that question the underlying orthodoxies of the plutocratic and war-making establishment.
An essential enabling factor in all this is the abject historical ignorance of the political class and the "media pundits" now in power, people born, for the most part, between 1955 and 1975.
They, like most of the people they grew up with, have no real understanding of the fact that the middle class lifestyle they have enjoyed did not--as the ideologues of the Right have told them throughout their entire adult lives--just appear because of market forces, but that it was mindfully engineered to happen. That's right, it was meticulously and consciously engineered to happen by the political class that came of age in the wake of the Depression and the Second World War.
History is, at its core, an intellectual toolbox. By providing us with a broad longitudinal perspective it allows us to exercise critical judgment about the many things that are presented to us as "unassailable facts" in the heat of a given moment.
Without it, we are reduced to the status of children, people imprisoned by the need to respond in "socially appropriate" ways to the "urgent" stimuli of the cool (read powerful) people in our midst.
Look around. The coreless children (Cameron, Sarkozy, Obama, Cantor, Harper, and until quite recently, Zapatero) are now in charge everywhere, arrivistes all, careless and heedless in the way that only spoiled children who have not been forced to engage with tragedy (or some convincing representation of its stark imperatives) always are.
As people floating in the adolescent angst of the eternal present, subject above all, to a desire to please those they see as being smarter or cooler than themselves (check out Ron Suskind's accounts of Obama's obeisant behavior before the criminal bully Summers), they are resolutely incapable of the developing the only real compensations of maturity: courage, wisdom and compassion.
They are, sad to say, the perfect mirrors of their generation.
Our children will pay mightily for their arrested development.
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