What do you call a "movement" that's not actually moving? That's a question people are beginning to ask about the tea party movement. Defined mostly by those things they oppose, teapartiers -- almost by design -- don't really have any forward momentum. Like any other conservative, when the teabagger talks about change, it means they want to change things back. As a whole, conservatives always seem to see the future as a way to return to some perfect past. And that past is always mostly imaginery -- plenty of people have already written that the Ronald Reagan conservatives have made a saint is not the Ronald Reagan who actually existed.But to answer the question, the word you use to describe a static "movement" is "dying." Where modern conservatism is backward-looking, the tea party -- by it's reactionary nature -- is trapped forever in the present. There is a future they look forward to, but it kind of skips a step; we undo everything Obama has done, get sufficiently insane candidates in office, and everything becomes perfect forever. This Utopianism ignores the fact that everything was massively screwed up before their hated Obama ever took office. So returning to the past is returning to an extremely FUBAR situation. They're against what exists right now, but they aren't actually for anything to speak of -- unless it's the polar opposite of whatever comes out of the current president's mouth.
On Monday, I wrote about the big Uni-Tea rally the tea party threw to demonstrate their non-racism and diversity. "The crowd was pretty thin, which suggests to me two explanations, to be taken either in combination or separately," I said, "the average teabagger finds a rally without all the racism no fun and/or the tea party is suffering from outrage fatigue and losing steam." Turns out I'm not alone in that assessment...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
