What makes the Tea Party potentially dangerous to Republicans?
Internal party fracturing is normal for a political party just after a series of severe losses such as the Republicans faced in 2008. However tracing events back to even before the election, we saw the first rumblings of what has started to look like a deeper set of cracks in the Republican party's membership. Sarah Palin highlighted a division within the ranks that was well underway before the loss. Sarah terrified the fiscal and moderate conservatives along with 'Reagan democrats' who voted Republican, but was borderline deified by the social conservatives whose special interests and single issue participation had become more and more important to the Republican voter base. The 'sanctification' of social conservatism at the expense of intellectualism symbolized by making Palin the VP candidate was in many ways the last straw for numerous moderate conservatives. After 2008, only roughly 21% of the US population identified themselves as Republicans.
Who remained?
The short answer is 'the wrong kind of Conservatives'. The media war started against the left had taken on a life of its own. Conservative pundits had discovered there was big money to be made in political talk, and in an effort to outdo one another, made more and more outrageous claims to gather the attention of media and listeners. This drove the attacks to the point of inventing facts and talking points that had no real substance when investigated. The antics of Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others making outrageously inaccurate claims in the name of Conservative political entertainment. While it fired up some voters, this also managed to disenfranchise much of the 'thinking' conservatives making them nervous about their own party's behavior.
Many of these thinking conservatives fled the party in 2008. This left the Republicans in the hands of a three generally identifiable groups:
First, there were the media war causalities. These voters, ever more radical and fired up, took one of the above Pundits to be absolute truth and never any claims made by their 'patron', treating any critique of those claims to be anti-American.
Second, single issue voters and special interests. Issues such as religion, abortion, gay marriage, 2nd amendment defenders, etc. These voters were never concerned with the politics of the parties, but rather voted for the one thing they cared deeply about.
Third, ticket voters. A body of voters who were mostly not paying attention to the political ebb and flow, but identified for the most part with the party's overall stance and simply voted Republican by default.
Now Republican primaries require you to be Republican to vote. With fired up social conservatives in the Palin crowd and media war casualty Republicans frothing nonsense about birth dates, socialism and fearing the execution of their grandparents making up a greater and greater percentage of the remaining Republican party, the ability to produce a viable candidate that could win in a general election including moderates and independents starts split and crack.
So what we see going into 2010 is the product of a radicalized and disenfranchised Republican voter base barely held together by an even stronger dislike for the Obama administration. I think most thoughtful Republicans would have scoffed at the idea that the Tea Party whose platform reads like a libertarian manifesto could could present a viable challenge to the classic Republican candidate. Yet they did. In less than a year of existence, a radical fringe of conservative America turned out record numbers of Tea Party primary challengers in the Republican primaries.
The good news is, for the most part, they lost.
The bad news is that these Tea Party conservatives are, whether they know or not, participating in a de-facto growing internal revolt against the Republican party's neo-economic global focus. Tea Partiers have good reason to be doing so and it's not because of Obama. If you distill the Tea Party message away from some of the ridiculous specifics, what you see is that they want a return to conservative basics. They want to see the values they hold as conservative Americans championed instead of being pandered to by trans-national Republican masters or ignored by Democratic social 'progressives'. The risk to the Republican party is that the underlying spirit of the Tea Party's message is seductive and growing, not just a temporary pulse in a dissatisfied electorate.
The battle facing the Republican party, therefore, centers on how this internal revolt is handled. If managed properly, it may be exactly what the party needs – a reinvention of its values and a return to its roots that starts with passion and unfocused anger and becomes a voice of reform away from massive business and narrow special interest and towards the conservative values I dictated early this week. If handled improperly, the Tea Party could splinter off, taking a huge chunk of the conservative electorate with it. A New Conservative Party fueled by grass roots rage could become a battleground from which conservative politics would not recover for a very long time leaving Democrats to run the country unopposed.
Drinking Tea has never been quite this dangerous for Conservative voters.
Internal party fracturing is normal for a political party just after a series of severe losses such as the Republicans faced in 2008. However tracing events back to even before the election, we saw the first rumblings of what has started to look like a deeper set of cracks in the Republican party's membership. Sarah Palin highlighted a division within the ranks that was well underway before the loss. Sarah terrified the fiscal and moderate conservatives along with 'Reagan democrats' who voted Republican, but was borderline deified by the social conservatives whose special interests and single issue participation had become more and more important to the Republican voter base. The 'sanctification' of social conservatism at the expense of intellectualism symbolized by making Palin the VP candidate was in many ways the last straw for numerous moderate conservatives. After 2008, only roughly 21% of the US population identified themselves as Republicans.
Who remained?
The short answer is 'the wrong kind of Conservatives'. The media war started against the left had taken on a life of its own. Conservative pundits had discovered there was big money to be made in political talk, and in an effort to outdo one another, made more and more outrageous claims to gather the attention of media and listeners. This drove the attacks to the point of inventing facts and talking points that had no real substance when investigated. The antics of Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others making outrageously inaccurate claims in the name of Conservative political entertainment. While it fired up some voters, this also managed to disenfranchise much of the 'thinking' conservatives making them nervous about their own party's behavior.
Many of these thinking conservatives fled the party in 2008. This left the Republicans in the hands of a three generally identifiable groups:
First, there were the media war causalities. These voters, ever more radical and fired up, took one of the above Pundits to be absolute truth and never any claims made by their 'patron', treating any critique of those claims to be anti-American.
Second, single issue voters and special interests. Issues such as religion, abortion, gay marriage, 2nd amendment defenders, etc. These voters were never concerned with the politics of the parties, but rather voted for the one thing they cared deeply about.
Third, ticket voters. A body of voters who were mostly not paying attention to the political ebb and flow, but identified for the most part with the party's overall stance and simply voted Republican by default.
Now Republican primaries require you to be Republican to vote. With fired up social conservatives in the Palin crowd and media war casualty Republicans frothing nonsense about birth dates, socialism and fearing the execution of their grandparents making up a greater and greater percentage of the remaining Republican party, the ability to produce a viable candidate that could win in a general election including moderates and independents starts split and crack.
So what we see going into 2010 is the product of a radicalized and disenfranchised Republican voter base barely held together by an even stronger dislike for the Obama administration. I think most thoughtful Republicans would have scoffed at the idea that the Tea Party whose platform reads like a libertarian manifesto could could present a viable challenge to the classic Republican candidate. Yet they did. In less than a year of existence, a radical fringe of conservative America turned out record numbers of Tea Party primary challengers in the Republican primaries.
The good news is, for the most part, they lost.
The bad news is that these Tea Party conservatives are, whether they know or not, participating in a de-facto growing internal revolt against the Republican party's neo-economic global focus. Tea Partiers have good reason to be doing so and it's not because of Obama. If you distill the Tea Party message away from some of the ridiculous specifics, what you see is that they want a return to conservative basics. They want to see the values they hold as conservative Americans championed instead of being pandered to by trans-national Republican masters or ignored by Democratic social 'progressives'. The risk to the Republican party is that the underlying spirit of the Tea Party's message is seductive and growing, not just a temporary pulse in a dissatisfied electorate.
The battle facing the Republican party, therefore, centers on how this internal revolt is handled. If managed properly, it may be exactly what the party needs – a reinvention of its values and a return to its roots that starts with passion and unfocused anger and becomes a voice of reform away from massive business and narrow special interest and towards the conservative values I dictated early this week. If handled improperly, the Tea Party could splinter off, taking a huge chunk of the conservative electorate with it. A New Conservative Party fueled by grass roots rage could become a battleground from which conservative politics would not recover for a very long time leaving Democrats to run the country unopposed.
Drinking Tea has never been quite this dangerous for Conservative voters.
Let me amend briefly to indicate that when I say the 'wrong kind of conservative' was left, it was the TREND that was leaving the wrong kind. There were and are plenty of the right kind of conservatives still in the Republican party, but the percentage of the more extreme or apathetic variety had dramatically increased by comparison.
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