I've been using blog housekeeping time to determine how much content from the old Tea Party days needs to be pulled down to prevent link hijacking. Well, it's going...and, remembering Jim Babka's phrase, I wonder, "Oh, where, oh, where is the Spirit of Tea?" (If you don't know the tune, no worries, you've not missed out on one of the truly great American cultural experiences.)
Oh where, oh, where is the Spirit of Tea?
Oh where, oh, where can it be?
Bipartisan, fisc'ly conservative,
Oh where, oh, where can it be?
The Tea Party started--you could look this up online once, and it ought to be documented in a printed source somewhere--with some Democrats who thought they were being Taxed Enough Already to support what they called W Bush's war. It became a bipartisan phenomenon and thus attracted the news media's attention when Republicans latched on to "Taxed Enough Already" to describe their opinion of the boondoggle of mandatory medical insurance. As an Independent I didn't really like paying taxes to support either of those two bad things, so of course I was a Tea Party. Just about anyone who thought about the news issues of the turn of the century suddenly realized, some time around 2010, that we were all Tea Parties.
Because the Tea Party was a real "grassroots" movement, not funded or coordinated by any big financial interest (although attempts were made, later), there were no official criteria for being a Tea Party. The whole idea was that anyone who thought they'd paid enough taxes last year, for any reason, was part of the general movement. There was no requirement that the various Tea Party groups and individuals link up or agree on common goals. Alliances were formed, but vigorous disagreement on methods and priorities was the point.
Did the Tea Party fail? Well, most of the web sites have gone down. A lot of the more serious and worthwhile groups were made up of people who had "retired" in 2010, and a lot of those people "really retired" before 2020. My virtual group fell apart early as others in the group decided they didn't like or trust the Internet. Some people's favorite legislative issues succeeded, some failed. Some of us are still working on ours.
What was alarming was the emergence, in both major parties, of people self-identified as "party leaders" who didn't think the major parties needed correction from the "grassroots." A self-identified Republican writer, who also admitted he'd immigrated from England rather recently, advised Rs that their best strategy was to ignore the Religious Right and the Tea Parties and play up to their biggest funders, the frat boys who became golf club men, whose idea of being "conservative" meant conserving whatever had allowed them to be so rich. Democratic Party polls had mapped a deep divide between the "limousine Left" (prime example: Flood Pants Harris) and the actual D voters, most of whom were if anything more "conservative" than the average R on all issues except funding for the handouts on which these voters depended.
And that "we're the rich people who fund the party, we can AFFORD to ignore the people who either don't have as much money or don't spend it on party politics" attitude has prevailed. In both parties. It's un-American and it's an open insult to the party voters, but by exploiting "polarization," making the less intelligent people who identify with either party hate and fear the other party, it's been working.
And what's happened to the Tea Party movement, a loose coalition of groups of all ages, all ethnic types, all political and religious persuasions, who were going to work within their existing networks to identify wastes of tax money and correct them?
What I saw from the beginning was that a lot of people who said "I'm the Tea Party" were naive types who understood themselves to be saying something more like "Hey, party, I'm for that, let's PAR-TY!" and expected to wake up with headaches and forget what they'd been doing the next day. They did not intend to work on anything. They did not realize that making a movement for social change is work, although it's normally safe and easy work. It takes at least consistent thought and talk, if not writing or organizing, over years. This is not a problem if you're working on things you really believe in, nor is it incompatible with "personal" goals like educating your children. The personal is political., The idea that children should be educated is a political statement. That statement happens to be most effectively made by educating your own children. All the Tea Party demanded was consistency but a few people really didn't have much of that.
Other people had consistency, and even fortitude, but weren't so sure about political statements. They didn't want to be sucked into groups or mistaken for supporters of things they did not in fact support. The Spirit of Tea is still alive in those people, at least the ones of them who are still alive. This web site has recently lost two prime examples. Grandma Bonnie Peters was not much of a joiner and actually advised me, in the early years of this blog, to try to stay away from politics so at least people would read our recipes. (She was a lifelong Republican but, like many Republicans, she'd rather strengthen a business contact with a Democrat than talk about any ongoing elections.)
Other people have been gaslighted and/or been the targets of gaslighting by those self-appointed party leaders, who were quick to proclaim the death of the Tea Party while several Tea Parties were still holding meetings. By 2016 those who wanted to manipulate the people by two-party "polarization" were gloating that "the Tea Parties, who were basically right-wingnuts, have been enlisted in support of Trump." Rrreally?
What I saw more of was Tea Parties who either wanted to be active on only one issue, and felt that they'd either "won" or "lost," or else imagined that widespread public support for a few good ideas would get those ideas supported by Congress within one election cycle. So they took their marbles and went home. It may be a good idea for some retirees to go home before we've lost all our marbles, har har, but seriously, so many younger Tea Parties gave up so soon...They didn't realize how much opposition their opposition's ideas faced, how long and hard people have worked so that some bad ideas could be tried and their badness quantified. Young people need to be planning a multigenerational effort to replace some bad ideas with good ideas.
One thing I really don't like at all about this is the hubris of the self-appointed party leaders. They want to revive feudal-style thinking. All humans, they have discovered, are not created equal. There are people like themselves, the elite. They don't admit any official working definition of the ruling class, as they see it, but basically it's defined by being rich and, depending on whom you ask, by computer programming skills. There is a new vertical arrangement of society with a top and a bottom. They are at the top. They believe decisions should be made and enforced from the top down. What people other than themselves are saying does not and should not matter. Party bosses should ignore the voters and steer the major political parties in the direction that works for them.
Democrats. Republicans. Do youall really want to allow parties led by people like that to exist? Why?
One thing I miss is the nonpartisan goal this web site originally had, of articulating the views of the actual electorate in a spirit of impersonal good will that elected officials should be able to understand. We don't liiike all elected officials equally. We don't pretend to. With a few exceptions, however, like Terribly McAwful and Mean Girl McDowdypants, who we have decided are beyond all hope...we don't make that decision quickly. We have good will for all politicians, whether we voted for them or not. We can and will elect different ones for the next term to correct the current ones' mistakes. While people for whom other people voted are in office, we respect the office, and the human beings in it, enough to try to educate office holders on the actual issues...with malice toward none, with charity toward all. That's the way Americans do politics, as distinct from the way the ignorant, violent canailles in feudal countries do politics. Evolution, not revolution. Education, not hostilities. I don't see much of that in what I still inevitably see of the sellout commercial media. Corporate greedheads have decided to put their support into redefining politics as "Do you love Trump, or do you hate Trump, are you up for a RIOT in support or opposition of Trump?" and ignoring the reality that most of us have only vague, general disapproval for Trump personally and may or may not even disapprove of him more than we disapprove of Biden and Harris. Corporate greedheads, many of whom come from backward feudal countries (such as Germany, not to mention China), don't like to wrap their minds around the idea that "ordinary" people, people with no interest in clawing their way to the tops of corporations, prefer to think and talk about ideas rather than attach emotions to the images of people they see on television.
Well, deal with it, greedheads. There are good and bad ideas. (Your kind of elitism is an extremely bad idea; it should cost your corporations money.) There are good and bad policies. There are good and bad laws. Most people in both the US Congress and the various state legislatures have been identified with some of both. We judge ideas, not people. Our goal is to make it easier for more people to support good ideas.
No, we can't always avoid noticing characteristics we like or dislike about people. Trump is not a gentleman and can't pass for one, although one of his public statements, about Biden's being pushed out of the election, has been circulated as a gentlemanly thing to have said. (Makes you wonder who wrote it.) How much does it matter that a President be a gentleman? We've had others who weren't, who accomplished some good things. Obama was a gentleman, his grace under pressure was a splendid sight, but he caved without even being visibly pushed, on important issues, after election, and his administration was an economic mess. Biden is a gentleman but, whether because he honestly hasn't understood any political issues since 1990 or because he made a decision to be the puppet of the limousine-Left elitist party "leaders," their puppet is what he's been, and his administration has been among the worst in history. Because limousine-Left ideas like censorship and the revival of a feudal hierarchy, a Marxist "class" system, and like printing more paper money so that the taxpayers' own earned or saved money is worth less, and like "top-down" revivals of the national medical insurance plan the electorate loathe, are disastrous ideas. And, even so, to say that the ideas the Biden Administration enacted into policy belong in the biomass burner of history is not to say that we hate Biden, who inspires more pity than hate. It is not even to say that we hate Harris, although she overtly insulted this web site and we will return the insults until we receive a public apology. It is to say that these ideas do not work and should be rigorously rejected in the future. It is to say that, even if we knew Harris personally and liked her, no candidate associated with the policy trainwreck of the Biden Administration deserves a chance to be elected to any office anywhere. Harris should go home and try to have a decent private life.
Is Trump a perfect candidate? Will a second Trump Administration make America great again? Of course not. Is Kennedy a perfect candidate? Will a second Kennedy Administration transport America to Camelot? Of course not. We have to vote on the issues that matter to us and, for better or for worse, unless and until Trump publicly joins Glyphosate Awareness, we have to vote for Kennedy. We have to anticipate some bad things about either of the possible next administrations, and try, with charity rather than malice, to articulate the right ideas so that human beings in either administration can understand them.
Are young people seriously planning to sit back and let members of my generation, and what's left of the older one, dispose of their futures? I find that hard to believe. I'd like to see more about what they are planning, beginning with the essential first step to short-circuit "social credit" manipulation: Zero out your social credit score. Don't comply with "social credit" schemes. Say "Well, I have no social credit and I don't have a lot of time for anyone who does." Say, "Life's too short to read bestsellers, I buy only censored books." Make "social credit" backfire. We can always get the corporate-media-approved point of view, free of charge...so we should only ever pay for the alternatives!
This feels so mean--some good writers and good friends, including Zahara Heckscher who was both, used to publish with Penguin, which used to be a nice American publisher, and served them well--but now that you know Penguin's currently owned by Europeans who not only censor books and writers but also send out phishy junkmail on the Internet, why would you ever buy another book from the Penguin empire as it currently exists? Buy self-published books, with a preference for the ones Amazon refuses to promote.
The city of Boston used to be known for its public-spirited feminists ("Boston Bluestockings") as well as its Catholic and Congregationalist churches, members of which used to compete to be more overtly virtuous than each other. It was known for snobbery and for slums, too, but The Proper Bostonians really tried to maintain high standards of taste. So, about a hundred years ago, books with explicit sex scenes and movies that showed flashes of nudity used to be "Banned in Boston." And what was the consequence? To sell a book or movie in other cities (from which copies would of course be sent to people in Boston), it came to seem necessary that it be "Banned in Boston." The same dynamic needs to work with censored books and media today. If you were never blocked or shadowbanned on Twitter, the best explanation is that you weren't using the Internet in the 2010s. "Hateful, hurtful" content was usually neither hateful nor hurtful, but freethinking. We want more of that. I don't think intelligent people can take much interest in content that really does express bigotry toward groups of people defined by hereditary traits, but by all means, let's see more content that is hateful and hurtful toward corporate products, especially in the sense of calling attention to the harm some of them have done!
It's easy for older people to say "What are young people going to do about X, Y, and Z? I can't help much; I'll be dead." It may or may not be true, and it's not a good strategy if it is. Let's just say that, for good and sufficient reasons, I used to think I'd never live to age forty, and so one morning I woke up, and there I was, forty, not even looking "older" than I'd looked at thirty. Plans based on the idea that I was going to be dead were not helpful. If a human generation is 20 or 25 years, the last baby-boomers were born in either 1965 or 1970, so by the year 2070 most of us will be dead. But we never know which of us will still be alive and writing. Chances are that the last of the baby-boomers will be writing--about longevity, of course!--in 2090. I think it's prudent to plan for that possibility too. When planning things like telling people we love them, if it's likely to become a source of pain that we didn't say that before they died, it's a good idea to plan for the possibility that any visit will be the last and tell them we love them now. It's not a bad idea to have a will, and payment for any kind of burial we want to have, all ready to go, starting when we are twenty-one, or whenever we have full control of our property. But it is a good idea to have a long to-do list that allows for the possibility that we'll be active at the age of 120. Y'never know. Some of us will.
All of us still need to be thinking about ideas that matter, Gentle Readers. All of us need to be talking about them. I want to use the Internet for all it's worth until they force us out of it, which, in the process of destroying it, the greedheads probably will. Then we dig out the manual typewriters and mimeograph machines.
It is still up to us to maintain our Republic. The greedheads are neither willing nor able to do it for us. I remember this web site started off with a real explosion of interest in the doings of our legislature, and this interest dwindled away, year by year. People who didn't get what they want in one season of Lege-watching didn't want to watch the Lege any more. And that's not a helpful idea. Voters and taxpayers need to be watching every state's legislature. If there are legislators who don't welcome the attention, that by itself is a fact the public needs to know, an indication that those legislators are ripe for replacement. I didn't enjoy Lege-watching any more than most people whose vocations are not to law and politics do, and was glad to hand that job over to other bloggers. Now that they've stepped down too...I'm not saying I want to watch the Virginia Legislature again, but they need watching. So do the legislatures of other states.
What became of the Tea Parties? The corporate media will never say this, but...most of them disbanded when and because they "won." Right-wing Tea Parties tended to be organized around the idea of getting "Obamacare" blocked or repealed. They chalked up a win with Trump, and many of them just went home. Left-wing Tea Parties tended to be organized around the idea of getting our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. If they didn't chalk up a win with Obama, they did with Biden. Many of them, also, just went home.
\Of course, neither of those news stories is over yet. Meanwhile, what are the people doing with their time? I'm not saying that being full-time active grandparents is a less worthy or even less political thing to do than being a keyboard warrior for some specific piece of legislation. Far from it. But this post goes out to the people who did not disband their Tea Parties in order to be full-time active grandparents, or parents, or to do full-time jobs or write books...who now have time to kill, watching television, and they don't like most of what's on television these days, either, but what are they going to do about it now that their Tea Parties have disbanded. To those people I say, identify what's happening in your field of interest now, identify where you can help, and dive back in. Because the greedheads want to think about public affairs and issues for you, the world needs your thoughts on public affairs and issues.
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