Today's output from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute’s state-of-the-art HEMMED (High-Energy Meta Mojo Elucidation Detector) machine is actually input...the media kind.
After over a year of watching the Tea Party --- Express? Local? (Loco?), I continue to shake my head in amazement at them. Back in February 2009, I was not willing to believe that they were any more than an astroturf movement calling themselves a populist uprising:
There are only two things wrong with the term "populist uprising": the Tea Party Movement is neither "populist" nor is it "uprising". Other than that, it perfectly describes what isn’t happening.
It should not surprise anyone that the Party of No is where the Movement That is Not would find a home.
What is fascinating now is seeing how confused the Tea Partiers are when they realize that their agenda is not being embraced by the rest of America.
I wonder why that is? What is not attractive about a movement that involves people wearing tea bags on their heads and carrying signs with bad spelling? And the hate...lots and lots of hate.
So how did it come to pass that Tea Partiers thought that their position was the majority position?
The Right-Wing Media Echo Chamber
To wit...the media echo chamber:
The term "media echo chamber" can refer to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an "enclosed" space. ... One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true.
The Tea Party has had a rude awakening as their candidates are roundly scorned and many have been defeated in the early primaries. They sincerely believed that everyone felt the same way they did. Because they see it on their TV (Faux News) and hear it on their radio (Rush Limbaugh) and read it in their newspapers and on their blogs.
It was that disconnect from reality that led them to believe that America would never elect a black president. And why that makes them so insanely out of control because...well...we did.
They are like the sports figure who believes the good press he is getting despite the reality check of his actual accomplishments. The tea partiers turn on Faux News and see the anchors all smiling, talking about birthers and reverse-racism and people coming to the United States for a better life solely to game the system.
All those great ideas like paying for doctors visits with chickens, saying the president is not a citizen, and suggesting that tax cuts are free ... is right there ... on their TV screen and on their radio. Must be true!!
They buy into it and they will continue to until they run smack into the wall of Realworldia, it is hoped in the form of electoral defeat.
And right now you can see that the tea partiers are so sure that they are the majority of our country that they are not holding anything back. Their hatred for people of color, women, LGBT and the poor is palpable and palpably distressing to anyone with a heart and a soul.
In a comment in last week's Morning Feature: Sacred Cow Tipping, Part III – The Milk of Kindness (Non-Cynical Saturday), NCrissieB said:
"I do sense a bit of lostness. A genuine "Huh? People disagree with us?!?" seems more apparent in Tea Party Republicans' reactions over the past week or two. It may be merely my own (optimistic) reading of their behavior, or it may be a real tipping point where Fred doesn't want the sour milk from their sacred cows anymore. [...]
Now, you and I might agree that the election results of 2006 and 2008 are strong evidence that a majority reject Tea Party Republican ideas. But they tell each other the election was stolen by ACORN, voters were just upset with President Bush or fooled by President Obama's rhetoric, GOP voters were offended by sex scandals and didn't vote ... anything but "a majority of Americans disagree with us."
And if everyone you listen to repeats those reasons and others like them, it's easy to believe they must be true and a majority of Americans really do agree with you. So we see a roughly 25% minority convinced most Americans are as selfish as they are."
Let's Not Kid Ourselves
It is one thing to mock the Tea Party republicans for believing everything they hear in their media echo chamber.
It is quite another for us to fall into the same trap. It is important for Progressives to look at their sources of news to make sure that what we are buying into is actually for sale.
We have one of the most important elections in a generation coming up in less than three months. We have a Democratic majority in Congress, we have a Democratic president with two more years on his current term and we have an incredible number of real problems facing our country caused by 40 years of neglect from the Conservative Winterand eight years of outright destruction of our economy, our social safety nets and our planet.
If we lose Congress, we have lost the chance to make any change for at least one more election cycle and maybe longer. And if you think that retaining the White House in 2012 will be easy if our agenda is stalled you are quite simply deluding yourself. Democrats win when we show people the good things government can do.
A little history for those who do not remember what happened the last time we had a Democratic president with a majority in Congress: In 1994, the GOP took over the House of Representatives. Republicans held the Senate off and on throughout the next 12 years and then they got a Republican president. The damage was enormous.
The difference now, of course, is that in 1994 the Republicans had been out of power for the better part of 60 years so the "Contract with America" sounded new and exciting. In 2010, we are only 4 years removed from the visible evidence of what a republican Congress can do. We need to remind our archetypal median voter Fred (and ourselves!) of that.
From NCrissieB again:
...there's always a serious danger when one's only reality-check is "Do people I listen to agree with me?" It's a danger for progressives as well, and another reason your Noontime News Roundups at the BPI Campus are so valuable. We need to be surprised by facts, and even disagree (without being disagreeable), or we risk falling into a folie à deuxwrit large."
(Hold on. Folie à deux? Googling googling googling ... hey, wait, there is a helpful link! Thank you, NCrissieB!)
folie à deux - (from the French for "a madness shared by two") a syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another
If there is to be madness, let it be the delusions of the Tea Party GOP feeding their belief that "everyone feels the way they do". And let's not kid ourselves that everyone feels the way that we do either. We need to talk to our neighbors, our co-workers and do some Fred whispering and maybe even some Fred speechifying. We need those voters on our bandwagon to join us as we "push that boulder up the hill" to shift the balance of wealth, power, and privilege away from the wealthy, powerful, and privileged.
Let's not wake up on November 3rd wishing we had gotten out of our echo chamber.
Let's take nothing for granted and let's look around us and see more than what is on our TV, hear more than what is on our radio and read more than what is in our newspapersand in our blogs. Because that is what the Rest of The Country is seeing and hearing and reading and we need to know that to know how to talk with them.
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Happy Thursday Friday to everyone! And fist bumps!
Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com)
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