Past Tea Party Posts

Occasionally I spend time glancing through past posts, sometimes looking for an idea to expand upon, sometimes merely to make the type face larger, as I have found that when I read the posts I created before 2022, I struggle to read them. I was using a "normal" type size for those first ten years, but switched to a "large" size (skipping medium in the process) beginning in 2022. 

Which means I have hundreds to upgrade.

I have also started searching for posts which have a "label" that has not been used a second time, in an attempt to create less labels, or to be more precise, condense the number of topics.

Today, while doing the condensing task, during which I also do the upgrade type size task, I came upon four posts I had written concerning the Tea Party Movement which began during Obama's first term.

I was struck by how the issues for which the Tea Party was most vocal, have not changed all that much, nor have my disagreements with their position. Further, that my concern that the movement was driving the GOP further and further to the right has not only proven to be true, but has intensified immensely with the new MAGA movement. 

I was also struck by the realization that in many ways, they are the same with a different name, although MAGA has a much more powerful leader.

Here are links to those four posts.

https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2010/05/tea-party.html

https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2010/07/deficit.html

https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2014/06/hail-to-tea-party.html

https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2014/06/more-on-tea-party-and-voting.html

If you choose to read any or all of those posts, you may agree or disagree with my assessment that today's MAGA movement is similar (or an extension) of the Tea Party movement. Research indicates that there are very few GOP members left in Congress today that were elected in 2010 and 2012, the height of the movement.

Still, many of the driving issues of the movement, smaller government, lower taxes, against the Affordable Care Act, anti-immigration, are still rallying cries for today's GOP. 

What strikes me, has always struck me about everyday working class Americans who embrace the GOP, is that the party has always fought against higher wages for workers, the ability to unionize, mandatory maternal leave and subsidized child care, equal access to health care services, free community college and trade internships, all issues that would enable working class Americans to live better lives, and all issues that those with money actively work against.

As I said in one of the posts referred to above, the rich and powerful display their genius in driving wedges between the 90% of us through their use of those very resources, and the enhanced access to our public servants that they wish to protect, and wish us not to obtain.

Nothing says rich privilege and using wedge issues more than the current standard bearer of the GOP, who has never experienced the struggles of the middle class, never had to make a decision as to which bill not to pay this month, never faced a job loss or accident that rendered a financial plan mute, yet has convinced millions of America voters that he fights for them.

Let's think about it this way. Since I began voting in 1976, there have been four Democratic presidents and four Republican presidents.

Of the eight, which were more "of the people"?

Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Biden certainly came from modest households. Bush 1 at least served in the military, but Bush 2 only became president because of his father. Still he at least exhibited some semblance of the every man through his cocaine usage in college.

Trump never served America in any capacity, public service or military. Inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his immigrant father, married two foreign born women, one of which used chain migration to bring her parents to America, would probably not know the actual price of gas or eggs at his local supermarket if pressed to answer, yet is somehow the savior of the American working class, union or otherwise.

Perhaps my first assertion is correct. The Tea Party movement is the same as the MAGA movement in that both were driven by the super rich to brazenly lie to the America electorate concerning the real subset of Americans that are ruining our proud country. 

It is the super rich who distort the facts and provide scapegoats which play upon the xenophobia, homophobia, and outright racism that all of us harbor, if even just a little, in order to deflect research into and the realization that, the real enemy of America, economic, political, even spiritual, is the blatant anti-patriotic greed and selfishness that is on display every time a CEO complains about lazy workers, or a billionaire complains about class warfare, or a rich politician makes up stories about pet eating immigrants.

Whether the day comes when the average American worker, average family man and woman, will step away from sports fantasy teams, reality TV shows, and even the everyday stress of making ends meet, and spends some time understanding how a more equitable distribution of income and wealth will not only drive our economy more efficiently, but will dramatically reduce the rolls of working class Americans who require assistance to keep their heads above water, then perhaps those using wedge issues will find no purchase in our collective conscious.

If it isn't obvious enough that trickle down economics is as big a lie as the existence of massive voter fraud, then google bottom up economics, the process by which an economy is driven by uplifting those at the bottom and in the middle by providing opportunity and access to the advantages that the rich have, often by birth as the ex-president possessed, and read who is against such a concept. 

It won't be the average guy, I can assure you.