I have been to two tea party marches. The people that surrounded me were pretty dayum smart people. They were not redneck, tabacky chewin hicks carrying guns and shouting “Obama is a Nazi”.

To be sure I saw a FEW of those signs around. But most of the signs I saw were along the order of no new taxes. Kill the Deficits.

But of course Obama promised NO NEW TAXES to 95 percent of Americans.

So he just calls them something else. Cap and trade….well thats not gonna work so hes gonna use the EPA to tax them….He doesnt care that these companies will just pass their costs on to the consumer.

The American people are now paying more taxes…..they just arent called taxes.

I have seen it described that Tea Party people are Ill informed….

What I found in my marches is that they are perhaps more informed then 95 percent of Americans because they understand whats coming and whats coming is a massive debt burden that will bring America to her knees.

Whats coming is that Bush lost his mind and ran humongous deficits to fund his little pet wars. Now the Democrats are in office they are going to triple down on Bush and run even more deficits to fund their little pet projects.

The tea party people are saying enough. If they have a convention I will go.

If they form a party….I will join.

The GOP running on IM NOT OBAMA is a mockery of the American people. The Democrats running on IM NOT BUSH is no less so.

Call me a bigot, Racist all you want. Im tired of two parties so entrenched in the pocketbooks of power brokers and PACs that they are no longer capable of delivering on campaign promises.

The only promise I want to see made is Fiscal integrity and restoring America to her rightful place as the king of the Financial world. If that means legalizing 100 million illegals then so be it my wife after all is a legal immigrant from Czechoslovakia and Im a legal immigrant from Australia.

I agree with you that the tea party events have seemed to emphasize economic themes over cultural ones. I suspect that’s partly in response to political circumstances – the recession, TARP, stimulus, health care debate, cap & trade – but it’s also easier to get large numbers of people to rally around key economic issues, rather than trying to come up with a coherent platform that extends into all sorts of thorny, contentious areas. The reason I quickly pivoted, in my post, from the question of whether Republicans/tea partiers are “going more conservative” on economic issues to the cultural issues, is that’s what too many progressives do: they maliciously pivot the discussion from “these guys over here are opposed to progressive policy A (economics), therefore they are reactonary racists, etc. (culture),” although they often do it more subtly than that. Again, my underlining point was about how progressives have been able to successfully define conservatism as a reaction/opposition to their agenda, rather than define it independently on its own merits, and then depict conservatism as racist, fascist, sexist, and so forth.

I also agree with you that the article linked above does seem to make some major leaps from one point to the next and that its one-sidedness borders on being reverse-progressivism. Still, it’s a bit unfair to call it “reactionary,” and I think you overstate the conspiratorial and paleo-moralistic aspects of the piece. It doesn’t propose any sort of political or ethical platform, per se. In the generic sense, the article probably is reactionary – the author is reacting against what she perceives as the pernicious tentacles of cultural Marxism – but I;m not sure we can say it’s “reactionary” in the loaded, politicized sense of the word, which is how progressives use it. I wouldn’t agree with her, but the author would probably respond to your accusation by saying that you’re acting like a well-trained moderate: “Double-thinking ‘fence-sitters’, otherwise known as moderates, centrists, and RINOs bear the imprint of these psychological ‘obedience’ techniques. These people-in some cases literally afraid of incurring the wrath of name-calling obedience trainers–have opted to straddle the fence lest they be found guilty of possessing an opinion, one way or another.”

I linked to the article, wondering if one of seven readers would react very negatively to it, because it very aggressively attacks cultural Marxism, perhaps sometimes in a brawling, undersourced manner. I would hope that voters and policymakers wouldn’t use such aggressive polemics as the basis for building their own policy/political platforms, but it serves a purpose. It’s an aggressive, no holds-barred reaction to the prior aggression of multiculti group-based identity politics. Would I put it on a college reading list? Probably not. But I could be a good launching point from which to start a discussion and pursue research. Saying that, I realize that I have vicious attacked similar pieces from the other side, but then those pieces were treated by the intelligentsia as legitimate discourse, while this article is probably considered out-of-bounds. I think it goes back to the question of whether those on the right should employ some of the same aggressive tactics as the left (e.g. Alinsky tactics), or whether it is better to always aim for a higher standard. Tough call there. I will say, I’m more confident in the ability of fair-minded conservatives to read such articles without getting too carried away with them, than I am of left-leaning readers encountering similar types of pieces from the other side.

Finally, if the author is a reactionary, then by that definiton, so are most of those in the progressive vanguard. Instead, the MSM and the academic/cultural elite vaguely suggest that 73 year old grandmothers who attend Tea Party events are borderline reactionaries, while those who aggressively attack cultural Marxism are full-blown fascists.

And the article does include several useful paragraphs, such as: “Additional intellectual firepower was required: a theory to pathologize what was to be destroyed. In 1950, the Frankfurt School augmented Cultural Marxism with Theodor Adorno’s idea of the ‘authoritarian personality.’ This concept is premised on the notion that Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family create a character prone to racism and fascism. Thus, anyone who upholds America’s traditional moral values and institutions is both racist and fascist. Children raised by traditional values parents, we are told to believe, will almost certainly become racists and fascists. By extension, if fascism and racism are endemic to America’s traditional culture, then everyone raised in the traditions of God, family, patriotism, gun ownership, or free markets is in need of psychological help.”

And: “A corresponding and diabolically crafted idea is political correctness. The strong suggestion here is that in order for one not to be thought of as racist or fascist, then one must not only be nonjudgmental but must also embrace the ‘new’ moral absolutes: diversity, choice, sensitivity, sexual orientation, and tolerance. Political correctness is a Machiavellian psychological ‘command and control’ device. Its purpose is the imposition of uniformity in thought, speech, and behavior.”

It’s possible that some attitudes have slightly reversed in the last few years in response to aggressive efforts to institutionalize gay marriage, etc., but that is not necessarily the case.

I’ve also primarily seen the movement as an economic one, rather than a social one. I think some have perhaps attached to it, hoping to return to the “good old days” of a more socially conservative world, but I think the economic arguments are what have attracted most.

When the coercive power of the state begins to elevate the priorities of multiculti group-based identity politics over “liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency,” the nation’s long-term prosperity is in jeopardy.

You just spent part of this article telling us that Democrats have attempted to frame all conservatives as reactionaries, and yet the article you choose to link to seems very reactionary to me. It is not just saying that raising multiculturalism up at the expense of American values is a bad thing. Instead, it crafts the story of a conspiracy to destroy America by recruiting gays (which are specifically targeted in the article as undesirable, through the misapplied use of a Freud theory), atheists, sexual deviants and, judging by some of the arguments made toward the end of the article, just about anyone to the left of the conservative base.

I do not agree that libertarians have ever provided any intelligible or useful meaning to all the chantings about “individual sovereignty”. It seems usually to be more of a rhetorical fetish than a coherent or applicable set of philosophical or legal principles.

Exactly my stance…I’d add …

When the coercive power of the state begins to elevate the priorities of multiculti group-based identity politics over “liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, decency….**AND INDIVIDUAL SOVEREIGNTY**….” the nation’s long-term prosperity is in jeopardy.

The Tea Party movement is an interesting* combination of fiscon libertarianism and anti-government populism. If the GOP is getting “more conservative” it’s a somewhat ill-defined definition of conservativism being used by Abramowitz.

(* — of the Chinese “live in interesting times” variety…)