By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--January 24, 2014
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Why does the Tea Party, a group that seems to represent a small but extreme part of America, have such an undue power which all too often results in a stranglehold over our politics and policies? Ever since its rise in 2009, the Tea Party's influence has been undeniable. They've won elections, stymied Democratic priorities and taken a sledgehammer to programs that are important to tens of millions of Americans. The sledgehammer approach has had a devastating effect on domestic investments like scientific research, education, infrastructure. And even with the cuts that were restored by the Murray-Ryan budget agreement, we're still spending less on these crucial programs than we were before the Tea Party's advent.Before an audience at the Washington, D.C.- based Center for American Progress Action Fund, one of those shady 501c4 nonprofits about which the Left incessantly complains, Schumer mouthed Media Matters-style talking points. (Schumer recycled much of the content from his speech at the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson Jackson Dinner on Nov. 2, leaving out his cheerleading for Hillary Clinton's possible presidential run and his incessant, fear-driven mockery of Sen. Ted Cruz.) Ignoring the near-absolute left-wing domination of the news media and the cavernous pockets of radical plutocrats like George Soros, Schumer attributed the Tea Party's rise to
...the capacity of a select few we know all too well to quickly spend millions of dollars on 501c4s, the ability of legislatures to gerrymander with reckless abandon, the power of a message machine led by Fox News, the Drudge Report, and the Rush Limbaughs that can broadcast the same exaggerated and even false messages instantaneously are all means that the Tea Party has used to gain ascendancy.Demonstrating his ignorance of how the Tea Party actually operates, Schumer insisted that somewhere in a smoke-filled back room a plot was hatched that allowed this thing born in 2009 called the Tea Party to gain political power. "It was an ingenious plan," he said. Those who devised it came up with "a superficial but very believable theory with an easy scapegoat: those Washington politicians and bureaucrats who created all this government to benefit themselves are to blame for all of your ills and anxieties." According to Schumer's conspiracy theory, this plan allowed the Tea Party, and not opportunistic leftist politicians, "to fill the vacuum and capture the anger that was bubbling in the land." "Democrats and most of America didn't respond forcefully to their argument," he said. This failure to respond let the Tea Party's ideas "take deep hold, virtually unanswered." Sounding like longtime Democrat Lyndon LaRouche, the senior senator from New York postulated that "elites" have somehow controlled the minds of Tea Party supporters.
The Tea Party elites -- with little rebuttal -- have been able to make "government " the boogeyman. They have convinced too much of America that government is the explanation for their all ills. Even though most Americans and even most Tea Party adherents like much of what the government does, the Tea Party elites proclaim that everything that is wrong, even non-economic and private sector problems, can be blamed on the government. Their mantra "dramatically shrink government and our problems will end" is the fundamentally false, but not effectively challenged premise, that is the core weakness of the Tea Party, and one we can exploit to turn American politics around to the benefit of our nation.First, the Tea Party does not have "elites." Unlike the neo-Marxist ideology that dominates the Democratic Party, it is by its nature anti-elite. Although Tea Party supporters are hardly tofu-munching anarchists, the Tea Party itself is an inherently non-hierarchical movement. It has no formal leadership. It was not designed. It came into being because despite the long march of statism and the siren song of redistributionism, there has always been a deep-seated, residual distrust of government in the American character. Americans don't like being told what to do and the election of in-your-face leftist busybody Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 made Americans justifiably fear that the end of the republic was at hand. The Tea Party is a patriotic, lawful rebellion against lawless post-constitutionalism and the out-of-control government that is crushing civil society and condemning the nation to eternal mediocrity. It exists not because an activist billionaire willed it into existence but because Americans will only put up with so much nonsense before they explode. It is driven by righteous popular indignation at governmental excesses and assaults on individual liberties, which could help to explain why conservative elitists like Charles Krauthammer find themselves unable to understand it. The very idea of "Tea Party elites" is an oxymoron that could only spring from the mind of a partisan attack dog with a woefully superficial grasp of American politics and history. Although the Republican Party's congressional leadership would love to neutralize the movement by co-opting it, no one commands the Tea Party. Nor could they. As my colleague, Dr. Steven J. Allen, has written, the Tea Party is not a formal, traditional political organization. Spontaneous and organic, it is decentralized and leaderless. It cannot be decapitated because it does not have a head. Even if significant players are taken out, its overall progress cannot be halted. It is driven by powerful, time-honored ideas about the proper role of government, not by personalities or demagogues. As Allen writes, it is more starfish than spider.
Cut off a spider's head, and the spider dies. Cut off a spider's limb, and you have a crippled spider or a dead spider. Unlike the spider, a starfish has no head. It has no brain; its intelligence is distributed throughout its nervous system. Major organs are replicated throughout each arm. Cut an arm off a starfish, and not only does the starfish survive, but the severed arm may grow into a new starfish.The Tea Party will continue to thrive as long as Americans believe that they, not unaccountable bureaucrats and leftist meddlers like Schumer, control their own destiny. Second, the Tea Party is not anti-government, as Schumer suggests. This is a tedious rhetorical straw man that left-wingers routinely use to smear those who don't believe in unlimited government power. The implication is that wanting to scale back the food stamp program, for example, is somehow equivalent to placing a politician's head on a pikestaff. Madness. Tea Party enthusiasts aren't anarchists. Like those who participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, they are complaining about the excesses of government. They believe that government needs to be restrained in order for America to flourish. They think that the Constitution is the best means of restraining it. Third, no one in the Tea Party outside of LewRockwell.com perhaps, a fringe libertarian website whose writers would overthrow the Constitution in order to return to the Articles of Confederation, believes that all problems in the nation would disappear if government were rolled back. This is another dishonest left-wing use of a rhetorical device. Only in Schumer's dreams do Tea Party backers make such an absurd claim. It's not the all-or-nothing proposition that he contends. Perhaps this alleged "core weakness of the Tea Party" has not been "effectively challenged" because it's not an actual "premise" that anyone accepts. If Schumer wants to try to "exploit" this "core weakness," let him go right ahead. He'll be participating in a one-person debate. My article from today's American Thinker:
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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