How do you feel about the Tea Party?

How people feel about the Tea Party and how they feel about the government are very different questions. Personally, I don’t like either.

While the tea party may have started organically it was taken over almost immediately by special interests. I don’t care for the tea party now. The gov’t is more than one entity and I like some parts and not others. There is no real cohesion between gov’t functions so hating “the gov’t” is close to saying that you hate society.

Tea Party – a bunch of radical kooks who originally had a decent message, but let themselves be co-opted (and ruined) by the republican party.

Now on the way out. A strange aberration in American history.

Funny you put it this way.
Watching governmental rule is indeed
like observing the Mad Hatter at his Tea Party.

They started out noble, then got so bizarre that their own founder disavowed all knowledge. I think that says something about what they’ve become. Now they’re just a bunch of anti-intellectual anarchist zealots that seek to drag us back to prehistoric “might makes right” times with a blatant disregard for society.

I consider them a larger threat to America than Al Qaeda ever was.

The TP started with many right-minded ideas/ideals, but as quickly (perhaps almost instantaneously) subverted by well-funded special interests, as @ARE_you_kidding_me said. There always have been splinter groups that pushed back against establishment government. “Thanks” to them feel about the TP is not fit for print.

The Tea Party has gone away from their original message and purpose, which was lowering taxes and the amount this country spends. I could have easily embraced that, but when they began supporting candidates who were obviously bigger spenders than the democrats they were running against, I knew they were usurped.

I think there’s decent evidence that it was an astroturf movement from day one. It was immediately given a lot of undue attention and media coverage (mainly by Fox), which does not typically happen with organic grassroot movements—especially ones purporting to be anti-establishment in some way.

They never had any good ideas from the start. It was elite interests dressed up as populism.

The Koch brothers and Dick Armey fabricated the Tea Party out of thin air.

The Tea Party never started out with good intentions. They originated with some delusional rant on CNBC.

The police would never tolerate an grassroots movement, much less one that is actually about freedom.

It’s just a new name for far-right loudmouths.

If you want to learn about the phenomenon, a good read (from 1964!) is The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter .

This video is very informing about the views of both the new school Tea Party and the Old School

Unfortunately they are blended together in a fashion that is hard to separate the two.

Ask me how I feel about the fact that some dude brought his child to a frickin’ rally.

I’m a Democrat and when I first heard about the Tea Party I was interested. I flipping hate the national deficit getting larger. I also hate waste. Then quickly I realized the Republicans who were attracted to the party were mostly right wing, right on social issues, too fanatic for me, people, and I could not identify with the Tea Party anymore. So far, of the Presidents I have been aware of in my lifetime, meaning the ones since I was a teen (that would be starting with Reagan) Clinton was the only one who seemed to care about the deficit in a very realistic way.

Another thing I think about the Tea Party, or thought about it, was anyone who doesn’t realize it is a reference to the Boston Tea Party should just shut up. Ugh. On a Facebook thread way back when the Tea Party had ramped up initially a friend of mine who tends to lean right, but on social issues many times is liberal, had no clue. She didn’t even know what the Boston Tea Party was. I suck at history, but instantly realized the reference when I heard about the movement. I mean come on. A bunch of other people that fb thread also “learned something that day.” I’m ignorant about a lot, but I just can’t imagine being American and not knowing vaguely about that moment in history.

Deficit spending is the most misplaced priority ever, and the fact that people are still convinced the deficit is a threat is exactly why this economic morass continues. Unless you’re on a fixed income,* deficits aren’t very threatening to you. States (and European, specifically Eurozone countries) may have to worry about deficits, but they mean little in the context of the United States of America and any other country with a sovereign currency. Germany is teabagging Europe with its angst about inflation.

* Or, let’s be honest about this: are rich and own a lot of fixed income securities.

@1TubeGuru I thought dick armey was just what they called the tea baggers

@pleiades I think many Tea Partiers didn’t get the memo about becoming a radical organization and blindly support them because of what they started out as. Then again, I feel the same about Republicans.

The Tea Party is a grim reminder to just how derailed our Government is. Personally I am glad they exist as they do highlight the excessive largess of our Government but the extremists that have erupted in their ranks have poisoned their once prudent message.

Remember the Nazis?

I feel like the Tea Party won’t be happy until we’re an oligarchy, with a few rich folks running things and everyone else poverty stricken. I think everyone interested in the topic should see the most recent Robert Reich documentary “Inequailty for All.”

Critical to my most recent post about “Inequality for All.”
http://inequalityforall.com/

If it happened today the media would pay no attention to the fact it was a protest over British taxes.

All that would be focused on is some group’s whining that the participant’s disguising themselves as red Indians was offensive to them.

@SecondHandStoke In your example, the Tea Party is the East India Company, not the fake “Indians”.

@jerv I’ll just leave it at “that’s a curious perspective.”

They are scapegoats, hijacked & discredited by fringe extremists.

“Thus making the tea undrinkable, even for Americans.”

-Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/us/politics/to-hit-back-at-kochs-democrats-revive-tactic-that-hurt-romney.html?src=rechp

Odd, I was always under the assumption that the TP was a Kock Broz. project that suckered in the gullible put into place in a similar way of the astroturf grassroots movement where money was spent to convince people to call into a particular government office to express the views of those who provided the money.
Not saying that you don’t have those flag waving, patriotic, god-fearing white male tea partiers stating their feelings and hatreds, just that the initial funding and organizing was done by special interest types with an axe to grind.

You’ve asked two completely different questions in one. TEA parties are not a centralized movement, and they vary. For the most part they seem divided between the libertarian and authoritarian factions. I had already seen a libertarian get booed off of the microphone at one rally populated by mostly neocon types.

As far as governments go they only get away with what people allow them to. People vote too, so you have to factor that. I’m always hearing about people claiming we need different parties or candidates, but then most actually never vote for alternative options even when they have the opportunity to.

American Libertarian™ = authoritarian hierarchies + selective social permissiveness + deference for wealthy whites

@bolwerk I’m not a libertarian anymore. Personally I think it would inevitably lead to the authoritarianism it claims to oppose. Those with money and power would end up controlling the government and helping to shape laws and policy anyways. I think Ayn Rand was wrong after all, but she went beyond typical libertarianism, even opposing the concept of charity.