The Real Movement

[Valin]

The American Spectator blog:

Ned Ryun
Feb. 2011

The media seem intent on anointing a national leader of the Tea Party, no doubt for convenience's sake. But despite what people might see on TV or read in various media outlets, the Tea Party movement is not about national groups based in Washington, D.C., or those who have arbitrarily asserted themselves as national leaders.

The movement and its impact on the American political scene always has been and always will be about the local organizers. The national groups could go away and the movement would be fine. However, if the local leaders go away the movement dies.

And right now, something very organic is taking place with the real leaders of the movement: organized very locally in the beginning, the Tea Party is now organizing at a statewide level and beginning to network nationally. The Ohio Liberty Council, with 58 different Tea Party and 9/12 groups from across the state; the Florida Liberty Alliance, with more than 100 groups; and the Virginia Tea Party Federation, with more than 40 groups, are three of the best examples of local leaders uniting into significant statewide coalitions. Other states are in the process of developing similar coalitions, and it would not be surprising to see dozens of states similarly organized by 2012.

(Snip)

[Saltbag]

The ongoing confusion from a government and media that's used to dealing with lobbyists... How to respond to a group that wants you to do less for them.... And how to pinpoint a leader that wants you to do the least.

[Valin]

Comentary: How to Think About the Tea Party

Paul A. Rahe

February 2011

 

On February 19, 2009, when the finance commentator Rick Santelli indulged in a rant against the newly unveiled “stimulus” bill on the CNBC cable network and called for a demonstration in Chicago modeled on the Boston Tea Party, he fired a shot heard round the country. Santelli’s diatribe was focused on the fact that Americans who had played by the rules, had saved much of what they had earned, and had paid their bills on time were being required to bail out fellow citizens who had gotten caught short in purchasing a domicile they could not afford or while speculating in real estate. In the weeks that followed, ordinary citizens spontaneously gathered in towns and cities across the continent to organize Tea Parties in protest against what they took to be an unjust redistribution of wealth from the industrious and the rational to the greedy and improvident. The mainstream media treated them with contempt, and most Republicans kept their distance. Leading Democrats denounced them as frauds and ignoramuses and sought to brand them as racists. Even when the president of the United States used the obscene epithet “teabaggers” to refer to them, however, the adherents of what was coming to be a full-fledged movement—the Tea Party movement—stood firm. And in the course of the summer of 2009, as Americans began to grow fearful of the scope and intrusiveness of the Obama administration’s health-care proposal, that movement’s numbers grew. In August 2009, when congressmen and senators held town halls to discuss the proposed bill, ordinary Americans showed up in droves; and, to the evident dismay of their representatives, they bluntly spoke their minds.

 

 

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It is perfectly understandable that Republican regulars thwarted in the primaries, Democrats defeated in the midterm elections, and adherents of both parties who found themselves suddenly deprived of political influence should find these developments disconcerting. It is equally understandable that those who find unpalatable either the Tea Party’s approach or some of the more colorful and/or questionable candidates to emerge victorious as a consequence of its rise might consider this leaderless and inchoate force’s impact worrisome or even frightening. In point of fact, however, this sort of upheaval is nothing new. Such forces have risen periodically throughout the history of the United States and have their antecedents in 17th- and 18th-century England.

 

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To their dismay and that of their ministers, what soon came to be called “the Country” rose up in high dudgeon time and time again to denounce on the floor of the House of Commons what was perceived as favoritism, corruption, arbitrary rule, conspiracy, and papist predilections on the part of a Court thought to be intent on encroaching on the rights of ordinary Englishmen and the prerogatives possessed by Parliament. These tensions produced the English civil war of the 1640s, the execution of Charles I in 1648, the rule of the Rump Parliament and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, followed by the Restoration of the monarchy in 1658, which was in turn followed 30 years later by the Glorious Revolution.

 

(Snip)

 

H/T Scott Johnson Power Line

[NCTexan]

Comentary: How to Think About the Tea Party

Paul A. Rahe

February 2011

 

@Valin

 

this is a long but very thoughtful piece by Rahe.