Tea Party: Wider and Deeper Than You Know

This is a post that deserves alot more space and time than I have available to give it, but I want to addess the notion that the Tea Party movement represents an impetuous, childlike political tantrum, as the MSM tends to depict it. While there are a few attempts in the MSM to understand this movement in a serious way, most of the MSM is condescendingly dismissive. Here is a thought though. The Tea Party is simply a logical development given firmly in-place trends and was actually predictable with a little creativity. If you were adept at reading trends and extrapolating from events, the emergence of the Tea Party movement is not exactly far-fetched. Combine the thoroughly observable resurgence of interest in the Founding Era with the increasingly out-of-touch fiscal and social policy depredations of the political elite, and you have a recipe for exactly what we are seeing now across our politcal landscape. This City Journal article is from 1999 and it illuminates a rebirth of interest in the Founding Era. Furthermore, you can rattle off a list of bestselling books of the last few years that center on the founding era and its main actors (this, this, this, this, and this for example). It seems that for over a decade Americans have been getting back in touch with the ideas that animated the American Revolution and the people that drove it forward. Was it any wonder that the more people began to refocus and relearn the history of our founding that they would tend to see tyranny in large government more acutely, feel a desire to return to basic principles of limited government, and begin to demand more accountability from their political representatives? Hardly. If you accept this analysis it would seem that the intensity of the feeling behind the movement has some length behind it rather than being fleeting, and intellectual ground underneath the Tea Party movement is firm and coherent rather than muddled and haphazard. The conclusion then is that if you are on the wrong side of this movement, you should be very very concerned, afraid, whatever...but you should not be dismissive.