>>I have been scouring websites in the USA to try to find a good socialist critique of the ideology of the Tea Party. But so far I have found nothing. The WSWS website says absolutely nothing to critique the ideology of the Tea Party. It seems that many on the left are adapting to the reactionary ideas of white sociologically working class men.<<
There is no real Tea Party. It's the usual instigators trying to get white working class to vote Republican. The basic idea is that playing up nationalism, anti-immigration, and anger over economic malaise can keep these people voting Republican, especially in the South and the West. It's the usual 'insider as outsider' story of right wing politics. This time around the interests that fund such activities had to go outside the Republican Party mainstream, at least during the primaries, in order to get more people involved. Because quite a few are right-wing independents, that strategy actually makes good sense. Republicans, however, are often running against their own party. That is because they are pork barrel politicians locally, with pork barrel being where the pork is--military and security budgets. Ideologically such conservatives will say they are fiscal conservatives but they will actually compete for the federal budgets to go to their states, their voting districts and about the only thing they will actually agree on with their colleagues in the House and Senate is the need to increase the military budgets so everyone gets what they want--more spending in their state and local districts. The significant shift this time around, and one that means quite likely that Obama is a one-term president, is that so many governorships went Republican. That means they will control the voting in the presidential election. It will take some doing to unseat the president and his party from the executive branch. I'm not sure though that Obama can use the same strategies that kept Clinton in the WH. About the only thing remarkable about Clinton when you get right down to it is that boy sure knew how to win elections. I wonder if the challenge to the Republican establishment won't come from the Palin types but rather the Bloomberg types. OTOH, neither party has really managed to keep everything stitched together when a white male ETHNIC is involved--Iacocca, Cuomo, Giuliani, now Bloomberg. If he challenges as an Independent, he could spend billions in futility. If he tries to integrate into the Republican Party, they will have a hard time selling him and branding him for the nationwide election. If Obama had been caucasian (e.g., dark-featured caucasian, like some Arabs or Turks or Persians), that combined with his funny name would have doomed him. A plurality of American voters tends to not like ethnic Catholics, ethnic Jews, and African-American politicians (the ones with real African-American community roots, like slave ancestors, like parents and uncles and aunts who participated in the civil rights movements, etc). But Obama was seen as an 'African-American' who said 'white Anglo-Saxon' things most of the time and this made him the darling of a temporarily expanded Democratic Party, in which young and African-American and even anti-war lefties participated for the presidential election. That he managed to split the independent vote to favor the Democrats also helped. The guy had a lot of things to say when he was running, most of which I didn't think much of at the time. Now it seems he doesn't even have much to say. As for a Palin presidency--she is about as qualified as anyone else the Democrats or Republicans are going to let into the race. I don't think even the Republicans can sell and brand a woman though, especially one who can't read the script much of the time and extemporizes. What self-respecting Repug man would want to be her VP candidate? CJ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
