Chip Berlet wrote: "I agree there are several things happening here at the same time: election, political shifts, elite funders and their allies, the Tea Party as a social movement with a mass base--but they are not totally unrelated. Has dialectics been retired?"
The elements you name make a complicated context, and it is always difficult to sort out and locate the primary emphasis in such cases. But I am a bit skeptical that a dialectical analysis is called for. The whole world is doubtfully a totality -- it's more like a complicated plurality.
Dialectics is needed to grasp capitalism as a whole, but even capitalism is never, in practice, a totality: it only moves towards a totality!
I really doubt, then, that what you describe falls within the grasp o f Hegel's "The truth is the whole."
Again -- a footnote, not a real response to your whole post. Carrol
-