These tea party people....

The Tea Party are conservative libertarian populists. They have a 40% poll approval rating in the US, higher than the traditional parties. Unlike the other parties, they are not backed by huge donors and are a populist movement. 40% of Tea Party supporters are Democrats or independents. The breakdown is roughly 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic.

They aren't racist (but certain movements are trying to hijack parts of the movement). Racist is a smear used by progressives when they lose their support base.

They are anti big government, for low taxes, against policies that harm the people of the United States, pro freedom, pro liberty, pro the Constitution, anti bullshit, anti political correctness, anti green policies that destroy the US industrial base. They are anti the kind of things that George Monbiot believes in. They have arisen because millions of Americans no longer trust their politicians and the special interests that they support. They represent a vibrant democracy in action.

They are called nutters by their progressive opponents, who fear that the population is breaking free from their control and will no longer accept progressive spin.

I don't know Mombiot but we're hardly 'abandoning social progress' at the moment. The welfare state is taken as a given, but is being scaled back to something that Beveridge et al would probably find quite familiar - not abandoned all together. And we're asking questions that haven't been asked for over 60 years i.e. 'What do we want a welfare state to do? How big a role should the state play?' That's quite a different exercise to the one the Tea Party is engaged in..

I don't know a huge amount about the tea party (other than they're nutters) but I liked this from George Mombiot in the Guardian earlier this week:

"The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?"

He's talking about the Tea party and he seems to think they're blue collar workers (or at least some of them are).

There is blue-collar support for the Tea Party in the US, rather in the same way as there is working class support for the BNP here. Some blue collar workers in the US will be feeling hard done by in the economic crisis, seeing their tax dollars being wasted by the Obama administration to prop up the 'feckless' like the unemployed and bankers (!), racism never being far from the surface, very responsive when patriotic buttons are pushed. People with these sentiments are natural Republicans - and the more extreme among them find the Tea Party ideas appealing.

Yes that's probably true jackstar. I think that as with many other things the US is a country of extremes. Hyper successful business-women on one hand, producing and propogating a v sexist and hyper-sexualised view of women on the other hand. And then all of the millions of women in poverty and at risk of dying in childbirth etc sort of hidden underneath it all. I find the constant attacks on the right to abortion worrying as well.

I agree that US gender equality is 'economically driven' although backed up by the US being a more litigious society. So the equality laws they have are used aggressively.

"Fortunately, their brand of nationalism is confined to parochial flag-waving rather than empire-expansion just for now."

Chil - do you know if there is much white 'blue collar' support for the Tea Party? If not - I think they'll just remain contained (somewhat uncomfortably) with the Republican party.

whoops!

On the gender equality thing, is that the higher representation of women in senior posts or something else you're thinking of?

On the senior posts, I think that they get sod all maternity leave? So people are either straight back at work almost immediately, or give up entirely. So I always take that stat with a pinch of salt.

On the gender equality thing, is that the higher representation of women in senior posts or something else you're thinking of?

On the senior posts, I think that they get sod all maternity leave? So people are either straight back at work almost immediately, or give up entirely. So I always take that stat with a pinch of salt.

I think the comparison I'm making with totalitarian dictatorships is that, when there are crises, it's the people with extreme solutions that tend to rise to the surface. In the Tea Party case, their uber-libertarianism is only confined to those wealthy enough to benefit from it. The poor (coincidentally mostly black/hispanic) have no liberty or equality in a state where they are a despised underclass....and the creation of 'the hated other' is a totalitarian hallmark, you'd have to admit. Fortunately, their brand of nationalism is confined to parochial flag-waving rather than empire-expansion just for now.

BTW I don't think gender equality stand for much in a society that's so institutionally unequal in other ways.

Wasn't there the suggestion that the Boston Tea Party was instigated by coffee importers who wanted to break the tea monopoly? They justified it as liberation from unfair taxes and it's entered the mythology of the USA as a strike for freedom rather than an act of commercial sabotague.

Seems somewhat appropriate when applied to hese right wing nutters.

Chil - I agree with your description of the Tea Party's politics but I'm not sure that comparing the movement to the growth of 20th Century totalitarian dictatorships is right.

As you point out the Tea Party are uber-libertarians - anti central government control.

Although, in politics things can change - didn't Hitler start out as a socialist? .

Also, in defence of the Americans, they appear to have been ahead of the UK and most of Europe, in gender equality.

The Tea Party thinks the government should pay for the defence of the country and pretty much nothing else. The attraction to taxpaying voters is tht they would pay next to nothing in tax as a result, would not have to support anyone in need (except through charity which the US is rather better at than ourselves) but would pay for anything they need themselves. The politics of selfishness taken to an extreme level. The hatred of taxation runs very deep in the US psyche... hence the name 'tea party' invoking the spark that triggered the wars of independence.

The USA has a track-record of a very unequal society and has made few attempts down the years to level the playing field. It's only relatively recently that skin colour stopped being a legal barrier, for example. Wealth is very unevenly divided and 'I'm all right jack' could be the national motto. Many of the very basic things we take for granted as being part of a responsible state e.g. help for the unemployed, genuinely are socialist policies. But politics being what it in the US, and ignorance of international issues being fairly standard, 'socialism' gets easily confused with 'communisim' and 'Marxism'.

The last period of world depression resulted in the rise of European Fascism & Nationalism with disastrous effect. So a far-right US party emerging in the wake of a global economic crisis is not totally unexpected.