Tea partiers and anarchists - are they basically the same thing?

No way they’re the same.

The Tea Partiers are corporatists, sponsored from start to finish to whip government into doing the bidding of the highest bidders to reduce governments’ response to societal needs and direct government power and money(all of ours) over to unelected people(few of them).

Anarchists would be objecting to corporate power as well I think.

My impression is the Tea Party people of today still want a military run by the government. A lot of those Tea Party party people want laws to prevent gay marriage, they aren’t really anarchists or libetarians even, they are right wingers. But, I do think the original tea party founders were interested in less government on social issues and fiscal issues. At minimum they had no real opinion on the social issues. I was very interested in the Tea Party in the initial days, because I hate our national debt and government waste, but I quickly realized I am not one of them. What I dislike most is how black and white and one sided they think. Government does screw things up sometimes, but it also smetimes does great things. Same with private business and private citizens. It is a process, and we often in this country have the two working together. Government moneybhelps fund medical researc in the private sector is an example of the two working together. Although, even that combination needs some tweaking. It can be done better.

To a degree, yes. Some TPer’s may not be as adamant or aware of their unknown destructive ideas as knowing full-blown anarchists, but the result in many cases is the same.

The tprs. are in no way anarchists. Both the tprs and Occupy Wall Street are political reactions to the ongoing impoverishment of the middle class. To my mind, the big difference is that the tprs. are rather obvious dupes of the very class of folks responsible for their declining standard of living. It’s fascinating to witness a mass movement initiated and financed by the Koch brothers, stridently pushing for measures CLEARLY to the detriment of its very membership. It’s the clearest example you’re likely to find of a slow witted group prodded into acting against its own interests. It’s gotta be the paradigm model of “feeding the mouth that bites you”

Anarchists are NOT tea partiers. The tea party had no central leadership so it was easy for them to be infiltrated by special interests.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Well, anarchists have no central leadership either but I understand the distinction others are making.

That’s a complete misread. Limited government is not the same as no government. Our founding fathers knew the difference and so do the Tea Parties.

No, they are the marionettes of their corporate puppetteers.

No. Teabagger still want government, want that government to make laws regulating relationships between consenting adults, to make laws regulating what consenting adults can do with their body, what consenting adult can remove from their body, what consenting adults can put into their body. Teabaggers want a corporatist christian theocracy. They still favor large systems of control, be it government, church or corporations.

Anarchists want to abolish all systems of control.

Tea Party types are not intellectually inquisitive enough; they are reactionists that can only process simple yet incongruous concepts. They want a government that serves them and no one else.

Anarchists are passionate but simply want no authority for anyone, ever, but have no means of fostering cooperation or developing a society that allows for co-existence.

“Anarchists are passionate but simply want no authority for anyone, ever, but have no means of fostering cooperation or developing a society that allows for co-existence.”

Anarchism does not preclude mutual cooperation or co-existence.

One of the difficulties in answering this question is that there is no one definition or classification of “what is a Tea Partier?” The original TP was primarily focused on taxation issues and had some bi-partisan appeal.

But that original group ‘sold out’ (not for money, but for numbers) to the religious crowd, and then a little later to the Republican party crowd. Each of those metamorphoses changed the character and the specific gripes of that group.

The original TP were not anarchists at all – they were people interested in controlling taxes and having a balanced budget. They generally understood the value of government and the services that the social contract provides.

The TP of today (December 2013) is different. Some are nihilists. Some are anarchists. And there is more than a fair share of racists, neo-nazis, bigots, and apocalypticists. (and yes, I did men to associate them all in the same sentence).

The TP of today is much closer to anarchy (or it’s cousin, plutocracy) than the TP of 4 years ago. Or maybe plutarchy—very similar.

I don’t see how anyone who actually understands anarchism can say that the Tea Party is anywhere close to it.

Not anarchists just people passionate about their agenda’s. Like many others they change to gain suppoet & be heard.

@Darth_Algar Anarchists do not want to compromise any personal authority to society, and therefore cannot agree to a society beyond the size of a small circle of friends. That is why I disagree with your statement, and that anarchists do not have the means to enforce any cooperation or coexistence.

No, anarchists do not want to compromise personal autonomy to centralized authority. That does not mean that anarchists are anti-society or against any kind of social order or coexistence. But indeed if you’re talking about forcing co-operation then indeed that would be quite contrary to anarchist principals of free association.

Anarchism (not to be confused with strains of modern faux-anarchism and the spurious adoption of the terminology from right-wing individualists such as “anarcho”-capitalists and the “Libertarian” Party) is an anti-authoritarian political philosophy with its modern roots in the French Revolution and the work of William Godwin, and its later development and formulation with theorists such as Joseph Déjacque (who first coined the term ‘libertarian’ as a political term and synonym for anarchism) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, and Murray Bookchin.

The core tenet of anarchism is that authority, or dominion of one person over another, is undesirable and harmful, and as such has a heavy burden of justification. Social relations and institutions are critically analysed with this anti-authoritarian tenet, and it is argued that top-down hierarchical institutions, and social relations where there is a fundamental asymmetry of power. should be replaced by bottom-up forms of organisation, free associations, and institutions where social power is largely egalitarian (to the greatest extent possible).

Anarchism does not preclude leadership or expert authority, in fact, one can argue that recognition for expert authority and the elevation of suitably expert leaders, is one of the things our current society does not do well. (Think Donald Trump. GW Bush. or even Steve Ballmer.)

The Tea Party is a corporate funded astroturf movement full of useful idiots, largely ignorant, and with no coherent theoretical understanding of the system they live in. Consequently, they are able only to repeat slogans and clichés, and unwittingly promote ideas and policies that suit the plutocrats that funded their movement in the first place. They are the populist face of some broadly “Libertarian” policies, like lowering taxes on the rich, and gutting public spending—because that’ll increase their “freedom”.

The sort of individualism espoused by Tea Party and American “Libertarianism” can be summed up with this quote:

“Individualism is, in theory, a kind of Anarchy without cooperation. It is therefore no better than a lie, because liberty is not possible without Solidarity, without cooperation. The criticism which Individualists pass on government is merely the wish to deprive it of certain functions, to hand them over virtually to the capitalists.” —Errico Malatesta.

The Tea Party’s motivation is based on the United State’s Constitution.

The Constitution is about self governance, hardly about anarchy.

The Left, as usual attempts to deride what they dislike with the use of terminology.

If they can successfully label Constitutionalists as anarchists their work is done.

And the right is trying to label fascists as constitutionalists.

The tprs have about as much right describing themselves as “constitutionalists” as I would labeling myself the “Wizard of Oz.” The movement has the intellectual footing and depth of thought obtainable from a bag of kitty litter. It is actually almost painful to watch the antics of a crowd of folks who DON’T HAVE A CLUE that they are being shamelessly manipulated by people who have waxed to billionaires through treating them and their class like dirt.

^So we can safely assume that you consider yourself to be intelligent. We’re happy for you.

Obviously intelligence is an important and desirable quality. That doesn’t mean that intellectualism is the exclusive solution to all that is.

Your statement that others (The Tea Party in this case) must have arrived at their convictions through manipulation is handy. It’s just another way of hinting that another group’s principles cannot be the result of their members individual thinking or morality.

Conveniently, you’ve assigned “blame” to a group you obviously don’t like. Wealthy bastards.

So a Tea Partier misspelled a word on a protest sign.

That doesn’t mean every single one of them are imbeciles and that their every notion is flawed.

@SecondHandStoke
The idea that they would all be imbeciles somehow seems less worrying to me than if these people come to their ideology thru rational thought.

Please allow me my reassuring fantasy that they are all imbeciles. The alternative keeps me awake at night.

@SecondHandStoke “The Constitution is about self governance”

Funny, considering that the Constitution was actually a massive expansion of government power.

“The Left, as usual attempts to deride what they dislike with the use of terminology.
If they can successfully label Constitutionalists as anarchists their work is done.”

I don’t see anyone trying to label “Constitutionalists” as anarchists. Also, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed (probably not), but anarchists tend to pretty far to the left themselves.

@SecondHandStoke I’ll credit you with having the fiber to defend what I find indefensible. I also must credit you with standing up to withering fire. But once more my derisive attitude regarding the teaparty is not about a foam at the mouth hatred of “wealthy bastards”. It’s about the frustration of watching wealthy bastards march a herd of decent well meaning people off a cliff to their own destruction without the sheep once asking “Why is the wolf so nice to us?” or “I wonder what it is that the wolf and we have in common?” or “Why is it that robber barons notorious for their contempt of working people are suddenly lavishing a great deal of money and effort on the unwashed?”

^“Indefensible”

That’s cool. You consider yourself so enlightened as to see my position as perverse as to be inconceivable to you.

Don’t give me “credit.”

Your position might not be the juggernaut you think it is.