Leftist Denial on Tea Party Movement

Digby admits that today's Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party rallies have her worrying. Not because of imminent social unrest and the possibility of violent loss of life. No, she's frightened that today's grassroots outpouring will provide the framework for everday Americans to "simply fall back on the conservative propaganda of the past two decades to explain their problems."

Of course, Digby's a ringleader of the nihilist fever swamps, so her screed's not unusual. But you might expect more from Chris Cillizza, who notes:

Are these tea parties the first signs of life from the Republican base? Or a trumped-up attempt by Washington insiders to suggest there is significant opposition to Obama's spending plans?

How the events play out will be a telling barometer. If these tea parties go off without a hitch and are well-attended (and, as importantly, well covered by the media) then Republicans have something on which to build. If the coverage shows a serious of sparsely attended events or covers controversial statements made by attendees, the tea parties might backfire.

But check out Matt Taibbi's feudal exposition on the movement, "The Peasant Mentality Lives on In America":

It took a good long while for news of the Teabag movement to penetrate the periphery of my consciousness — I kept hearing things about it and dismissing them, sure that the whole business was some kind of joke. Like a Daily Show invention, say. It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of “teabag parties” as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis.

Having attended attended an organizing meeting last night with the Orange County National Tax Day Tea Party, I can assure people that "teabaggers" are not peasants. The meeting was held at a 12th floor law firm at Irvine's Wells Fargo Tower. I joined community activists and local busisnesspeople organizing against the "high-tax and deficit spending policies of President Obama and the Democratic Congress."

A huge theme I'm hearing over and over again is that the demonstrations today are not partisan. There's certainly a chance for the GOP to capitalize on conservative/libertarian grassroots activism, but at this point, faux Republicans are as big a target as the Democrats. But as Jay Newton-Small indicates in her essay, "The Floundering GOP Looks for a Turnaround," today's events may be the opening the Republican Party needs to regain its balance:

"The party has a ways to go," laments Phyllis Schlafly, a veteran conservative activist and founder of the conservative Eagle Forum. Schlafly says she takes hope from the grass-roots "tea parties" being organized against massive government spending across the country. One event in Chicago last week even boasted of turning away GOP chairman Steele, with organizers declaring they'd prefer not to have any elected officials at center stage.

Still, at Pasadena's Tea Party last Saturday, activists turned against political candidates trying to hitch their wagon's to the growing anti-tax outrage. The issue's particularly immediate here, as California has a special election scheduled for May 19 to approve Proposition 1A, a measure seeking to raise billions in new revenues for the state (for more on this, see "Don't Believe the Lies - Vote No on 1A-1E!").

I think political leaders of both parties should be scared, but on balance, it's easy to see why the leftists are absolutely freaking out over today's events. The more the Tea Parties grow, the more this country returns to its roots in federalism and limited government - which is antithetical to the program of statist-collectivism that's at the heart of radical left-wing ideology.