[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

[Carrol Cox]

Note - my posts have all been aboaut the Tea Party as a mass phenomenon -
not about the election (which bores me and in which I have no interest).
That is why I emphasized intensity. Voting, as well as responses to
poll-takers, is quite a passive affair and tells us very little about
people. But going to Tea Party rallies is an active affair, activism by a
sector of the population which is ordinarily (in my terms) passive, and that
is of some interest.

Probably Dennis says all that needs to be said about the election - a
perfectly normal mid-term loss. Passion doesn't show up on a ballot. I would
guess that all the people who make up the Tea Party  would have voted
Republican even had the Tea Party not existed and there had been a white man
in the White House. The election and the Tea Party are separate phenomena
and ought to be separated in analysis.

Carrol