You know, for all the talk about how crazy the Teabaggers are, there are areas where progressives and Teabaggers SHOULD be able to agree on if we take the platforms of both groups seriously.
And this mess in Arizona is one of them. I mean for Christ's sake, if you are paranoid about an unarmed, harmless census worker knocking on your door then this should make your blood boil right? I mean it's pretty clear that being stopped and asked for papers by armed police is a far greater government intrusion into your life than having a census worker knock on your door.
It's becoming perfectly clear to me that the Tea Party movement is anything but a movement built around the ideology of limited government. If that were true, they would be up in arms about this new situation in Arizona. If that were true they'd be joining progressives hand in hand in a call to limit discretionary defense spending.
No the Tea Party Movement isn't about limited government. It's about the inability to cope with the present. And it's not just about having a black president, though that's certainly part of it. It's much broader than that in my opinion. It's about the inability to cope with the information age, the inability to cope with what women in the workforce has done to the familiar gender roles, inability to cope with the fact that as every second goes by America gets less white--and perhaps most importantly, the inability to cope with the fact that the zeitgest has passed them by on all of these things.
The Tea Party movement and the conservative echo chamber that "informs" the movement speaks directly to this inability to cope. It simplifies the vast amounts of information available in the information age into a simplified good vs. evil story where liberals and their allies are the villains. It attacks all of the progress that minorities and women have made, not by arguing that minorities and women don't deserve progress, but instead by attacking the government programs behind the progress. And because the Tea Partiers aren't taking the matter head on, but rather concealing their anti-progress agenda under the guise of popular buzz words like "limited government" that have long resonated with many independents, they have gained societal acceptance on unprecedented levels since the zeitgeist decided the civil rights movement on the side of progress. Which helps them cope.