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

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Nov 5 14:06:51 PDT 2010


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



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