Dealing with tea party right in the future

[SpartanDem]

We can talk abotu our messaging and media, but I think our trouble with tea party go deeper than those issues. I think it's tied very much to who we are as a country I don't think it's a coincidence that the right ward shift in this country's politics has come while we've gone from a peak 89.8% white in 1940 down to 72.4% in 2010 and having elected it's first black president. Really you could explain much of our politics based on this I don't think it's a coincidence that other Western nations with much better social safety nets are very homogeneous not one western European nation has a more than 4% black population. I don't think it coincidence this is happening the as nation is becoming less christan than ever and is undergoing huge shift in view toward homosexuality. Particularly in a nation with a long history of fundamentalism

Miller says the U.S. has a tradition of Protestant fundamentalism not found in Europe that takes the Bible literally and sees the Book of Genesis as an accurate account of the creation of human life.After European Protestants broke off from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, they retained a hierarchy that remained part of the university system, Miller says.

"In the United States, partly because of our frontier history, most of the Protestant churches are congregational—they don't belong to any hierarchy," he added.

"They're free to choose their own ministers and espouse their own beliefs."

That freedom also included the creation of their own Bible colleges for training ministers, Miller says.

"If you send them to a Bible college that teaches only the Bible, they'll come back preaching only the Bible," he added.

What we have is people whose worldview is being challenged and are reacting by becoming even more hardline, we've see this in rise in fundamentalism in other parts of the world when this happens. I think it's fair to say this fundamentalism drives the far rights unwillingness to compromise it's not just a matter policy with them, but the definition of we are as country. For them that definition should unquestionably be white and Christan. This fundamentalism also why IMO is they always seem to out work us, the GOP has promised the sky and the moon to social conservatives and has delivered zilch nationally. They don't even make progress, but the righties will be out there working just has hard as they did four year ago, because fear and hate are heck of motivator. By contrast, Obama has made some progress on gay right issues, but some gay question support him due to speed/progress. It's why they are willing to drive us a cliff with the debt ceiling, the right and particularly the far right approach politics from very different place.


My question is how do we deal with these people? Longterm these people will die off, I see our politics shifting to left people clearly agree with on policy level, but cultural issues are what is clouding peoples judgement; 10-15 years from now the tea party will be a footnote in history like the know nothing party. But short term I think these jerks are going to be a problem for us, these people are psycho's they're driven by fear and hate so they will turn out no matter what. They're willing to hold the country hostage get what they want no matter the consequences. What reasonable GOPers were left have scare shitless by them. I don't see Democrats turning into Republican like worker bees who will turn out and support the party no matter what it does. I also don't see us willing take the drive off a cliff mentality. We also will have to deal with those not explicity tea party, but who are not comfortable with the changes taking place in this country.

[lunatica]

1. democratic voters should start thinking about running for office locally

I would except I literally can't stand in front of people to give a speech or talk. I start shaking so badly that people can see it from the back of the room and my voice shakes and if I grip the lectern it shakes too. I can't control it. It's the reason I didn't become a teacher.

But there are many of us who could do it. People should seriously think about it.

[Igel]

2. You pick the cause you like, in order to find the right answer.

You have 3-4 different rationales going and then focus on one, and that one boils down to irrationality.

It's very easy to claim that your opponents are irrational but the up and coming generation must be rational and as a result the problem will just go away. Even if the problem has gotten worse in the 40 years I've been watching politics, and in the 10 years' worth of stuff that I caught up on.


There was a nifty study done at USC a couple of years ago. They recruited people from the community and asked if they were liberal or conservative. They then asked the subjects about specific political views and actions, followed by presenting instances of conservatives'/liberals' views and actions. The core of the study was asking about the motivations--*why* did the liberals/conservatives have those views and do those things? Most conservatives and liberals self-reported their own motivations and said that they understood them, although the conservatives were less sure about their motivations than liberals. A lot of conservatives said they couldn't say much about the motivations of liberals or other conservatives. When presented with what was described as the self-reported motivations for the actions of the liberals or other conservatives most conservatives said, in effect, "sure." They just accepted them at face value.

*Liberals*, on the other hand, were statistically quite different. Almost all had an opinion about the motivations of other liberals and of conservatives. When presented with the self reports from others, the liberals simply disagreed, esp. when it came to conservatives' self-reported motivations. The liberals were sure that the others were lying and they understand the motivations, esp. of conservatives, better than the people doing the self-reporting did.

This surprised the researchers at USC who themselves were mostly liberals and who consequently viewed conservatives as judgmental and liberals as open minded.


The Tea Party is a syndrome, just like the "I want my country back" crowd is or the "they're not part of 'we, the people'" sloganeers. People want to dismiss the TP as irrational instead of asking what, exactly, is pissing them off. We know what's pissing us off, that we can understand; but we insist on understanding others only from our own vantage point, as though only one vantage point could possibly exist and that's, gee whiz, ours. When in doubt, we quote the angry, those incoherent because they're quoted mid-argument, out of context. Or the simply stupid, taking the lowest 10% to be representative. (Making for a shock when they turned out, upon checked via random sample, to be better educated than the average populace. This, of course, was promptly denied by liberals who already knew the right answer and didn't need any more data.)