While the idea of a formal “Tea Party” has largely been subsumed by scam artists (my personal example is Tea Party Patriots and Jenny Beth Martin, BTW), the SENTIMENT that drove the rush to capitalization of the movement is NOT dead.
We’ve gotten smarter, us Tea Party sentiment proponents, the one big mistake that liberals make is that the failures and peccadillos of formal Tea Parties of multiple flavor HAS NO IMPACT on that underlying prevailing sentiment.
You liberals and bluster and bloat how these formal “Tea Parties” flounder or fail, but you mistake that for the underlying sentiment, AND IT WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL.
” ... the SENTIMENT that drove the rush ... is NOT dead.
We’ve gotten smarter, us Tea Party sentiment proponents, ...
... the underlying sentiment, AND IT WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL.”
Sentiments are one thing. Results are something else. Unless someone can divine how to move from the former, to organizations capable of producing the latter, we will not succeed.
Worse, if we insist sentiments are sufficient, and that every step on any path to results must be scorned, we will not merely fail, we will self-destruct.
No action to date indicates anyone in the movement has become smarter. But it can be argued that many have gotten a lot grumpier.
Ted Cruz is a better-known example of a politician who used the Tea Party sentiment to advance his own career and agenda. The anti-politics-as-usual, anti-insider, populist, American first spirit lives now in Trump-Pence 2016.
When you’re running an insurgency, a hierarchical command structure assures defeat. Modern warfare is asymmetrical, decentralized and unconventional. Trump has run a model insurgent campaign.
It may be too little, too late, but many Americans have glimpsed the actual scope of the Washington Plantation. Politicians at all levels have conspired to construct an elaborate Potemkin Theater with the single goal of captivating both Progressives and Conservatives to ensure they all remain on the reservation.
Trump has blown up the parties’ false binary class structure and assembled a base that shattered boundaries once safely assumed unbridgeable by the other sides. While his methodology confounds the opposition, he has built a network that defies definition under conventional politics. The energy he has tapped can sustain a long engagement; let’s hope it lasts long enough to destroy all those who have sold out our nation for personal gain.