Rolling Stone on the Tea Partiers

Or the Tea People. Or the Patriot Movement. I really wish they'd decide what they themselves want to be called. Originally, they called themselves Teabaggers, until they found out that the moniker also connoted something... else.

Exerpt from the article:

    "Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

    "Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

    "But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

    "Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

...

    A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The Tea Party people certainly have justified, debatable complaints. I simply haven't heard any of those coherently expressed. Most often, it's pissed-off Libertarian types yelling "You're not listening to us!" into the microphones of the traditional media, which is giving them a huge platform. "Why won't you listen to us!"

Even if they get to the point of proposing how they actually would like to change things, it's always subtractive: repeal health care reform. Get rid of welfare. Eliminate Medicaid, the Department of Education and the EPA. Privatize Social Security and Medicare. Just get rid of government. Except when it suits them (government should be in control of abortions and anything you do in your bedroom.)

This is the modern Birch Society.