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September 17, 2010
It would appear that the Tea Party movement in the US is on a roll within the Republican Party, in the US, as it continues to remove incumbents or establishment backed candidates in primaries to stand in the congressional midterm elections in November.
This upheaval in the Republican Party is in the context of millions upon millions of Americans slid into security-destroying poverty following the financial collapse and the anti-big spending movement that began last year is pushing the Republican party to the right. What we are witnessing is the death of moderate Republicans by the tea party express of rightwing populists.
Michael Tomasky asks:
..the historically situated question is this: is the Tea Party movement a flash in the pan, or is it a historic fulfilment of an urge that has been building for 230 years and is on the cusp, with the help of Rupert Murdoch's "news" channel, of becoming a permanent fixture in American politics?
I have no idea. In American Prospect Paul Waldmann says that:
The central divide within the right now, as it has been for some time, is between economic conservatives and social conservatives. The former are essentially libertarian, believing that government action is harmful almost by definition. The latter are quite happy to have government making decisions in people's lives, so long as it makes the right ones -- about whom you can marry, whether you can get an abortion, and what public schools will teach
This is similar to the composition of the right in Australia with economics always on top. That means a libertarian economic agenda: low taxes for the wealthy and corporations, looser and lighter regulations, and opposition to any legislation to address climate change.
Glenn Greenward says that the Tea Party extremism isn't an aberration from what the Republican party is; its representative of the GOP, and its politics is expressed in a less obfuscated and more honest populist form. It is plain speaking right wing politics. Greenward describes the Tea Party thus:
it is dominated -- in terms of leadership, ideology, and the vast majority of adherents -- by the same set of beliefs which have long shaped the American Right: Reagan-era domestic policies, blinding American exceptionalism and nativism, fetishizing American wars, total disregard for civil liberties, social and religious conservatism, hatred of the minority-Enemy du Jour (currently: Muslims), allegiance to self-interested demagogic leaders, hidden exploitation by corporatist masters, and divisive cultural tribalism. Other than the fact that (1) it is driven (at least in part) by genuine citizen passion and engagement, and (2) represents a justifiable rebellion against the Washington and GOP establishments.
This right-wing populism is an eruption that will shift the Republican Party further to the Right.
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I pretty much don't give a tinker's cuss about the actual direction of the Republican's drift. What bothers me is that the WHOLE BLOODY system has (in recent years) raced to the right. HERE... in Australia!