One thing I've found after seeing numerous contradictory youtube videos against "liberals" is that Chomsky's hypothesis that the Tea Party (and the right-wing movement generally) is really an anti-Liberal if not proto-fascist movement, holds true.
Now at the risk of invoking Godwin, I'll just say that there is a clear difference between Nazis and the tea party but that there are troubling similarities. It's also worth mentioning that it's not much to brag about; for instance, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, also distanced himself from the Nazis despite holding a similar extremist ideology.
It's not about spending or "big government"
The consensus around the Tea Party is that it's actually just about spending with some social conservative elements present in the background. Aside from the obvious problem of the Tea Party not holding huge rallies around the Bush wars and warrantless wiretapping etc. is that the most prominent groups are social conservatives while fiscal conservatives are left in the background.
Indeed, if big government and spending were the main thrust of the movement then Ron Paul would be its clear idol while the social conservatives would lag in the background, when the the opposite is true.
As a Tea Party Patriots straw poll showed, Ron Paul only got 3% of the votes while the social issues Michelle Bachmann got 28%. The Ron Paul folks are at best a "faction" within the movement. As it stands, the Tea Party is predominantly a social conservative movement.
While there is a clear rhetoric around cutting spending, it's for spending related to "liberal" programs. For instance, healthcare reform would actually reduce billions in deficits but is opposed while the unprecedented rise in abortion restrictions is a clear intrusion of government both in women's private life and the businesses that provide reproductive health services.
So what accounts for this?
The "Golden Age" and Liberals
To get a clearer idea of the ideology at work, we have to understand the "golden age" that many hold to be the most prosperous time in the United States. That time, incidentally, is the 1950s.
While it should seem odd that the 50s are glorified, especially since economically they were far more progressive then today; it was also a socially restrictive time. As the far right Free Congress Foundation conceptualizes:
Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.
"What happened" according to the far right, is liberals and progressives made life worse by liberalizing society and leading it to an alleged decay. Men and Women no longer act like they're "supposed to," immigrants and poor minorities are taking all that the white working class has, and Muslims are trying to implement Sharia law, all of which are led by the nefarious progressive puppet masters.
While it might sound crazy, it offers a coherent theory for people's grievances. While most people's wages have stagnated or declined, their hours increased, their jobs outsourced because of policies that liberalized capital, public funding of education has been cut resulting in exploding tuition, the problem is instead pointed to social causes.
At worst, this leads to extreme racism of the kind you see in the Norway shooting; in a bid to restore the patriarchal, racially pure society of the 50s, there will be demands for mass deportation and violent rhetoric around the most "exotic" outsiders, namely Muslims.
The wrong correlation
Indeed, in many ways it's the wrong correlation, what made the 50s the golden age wasn't the fact that women and minorities were oppressed, it was that men had stable jobs, had wages that would increase every year, and could go to and send their kids off to college for little money.
In fact, one of the appeals of the fascist parties in Europe is that they're some of the only parties that run on economic populism. As The New York Times noted in France:
Jean-Yves Camus, a political analyst who is an expert on the National Front, said the party was the strongest advocate of state control in Europe, attracting a generation that experienced the economic boom of the 1950s and the current decline.
It remains “the last party to represent a revival of the state, based on industrial value and injection of public money,” Mr. Camus said, making it seem to some the true inheritor of Gaullism.
In the United States it's a bit different, government intervention is the code word for "liberal" meaning direct appeals towards it are out of the question. In fact, economic causes for decline are at best
considered irrelevant and at worst
denied altogether.
The right-wing bubble
It's important to note the real problems aren't immediately obvious and especially not for people stuck in the right-wing media bubble. For instance, people can't immediately recall their parents income and adjust it for inflation and compare it to their own income.
It's why the alternative theory of "evil liberals" has such a grasp on a certain segment on the population, you do see a clear difference between today and the 50s in terms of social attitudes but you can't directly see people's incomes stagnating.
Our job should be to illuminate these problems and to pop the bubble.