Or, as I might say if I subtitled posts: “How the Tea Party is Like an Awesome but Confused – or Possibly Brain-Injured – Running Back.”
My intent for this site is to have mainly original commentary, written by me alone, and when I link to other articles, I hope to be able to enhance it with additional personal insight or synthesis. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with being, to some extent, an aggregator of interesting and important content; it’s just not what I want to do, as enough people are doing it well already. I put a lot of thought into writing and editing of my posts, which is why there are so few of them, and why I don’t expect them to ever come with great frequency.
But today a friend tipped me off to The Weekly Sift, the site of a guy called Doug Muder. I was thoroughly impressed with the pieces I’ve read so far, and I just had to highlight THIS one, comparing the Tea Party to the infamous Wrong Way Marshall. Great piece of work, Doug!
I hope if you’re reading this you’ll click over to Doug’s site, but here’s a teaser:
a lot of [libertarians] are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:
- Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
- The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
- Our democracy is threatened.
- The public is told a lot of lies.
- People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
- If we stand together, we’re not as helpless as we seem.
I could go on, but you get the idea. They’re on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren’t running the wrong way.
What’s funny is that I was thinking along analogous lines just this morning, before I even knew about this site: I was thinking how disheartening it is to hear all of the criticism of the current administration, especially the more shrill and broad criticisms, coming from the right-wing talking heads. First, it’s disheartening because a good bit of it is true. But what’s even more demoralizing is that most of the people don’t even know why it’s true, or more accurately how deeply true it is.
They’re just regurgitating losing-side talking points that change hands every four years or so. Most of them actually believe that things would have been different with McCain/Palin, or could be different with Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, etc. The arguments stay silly and superficial, never diving into the truly unpleasant truths, thus playing right into the hands of the corporate elite. As long as we think it’s D vs. R, middle-class vs. poor, us vs. them, we will keep getting abused.
We don’t need to elect different politicians. That will never lead to progress. We need a different economic model entirely, and that won’t come until we have redefined the electoral system.
OK, that last statement begs the deeper explanation I’d love to write right now, but this is all I have time for today. Go read Doug. Here’s another excellent post, called Why I Am Not a Libertarian.
