The Demise of the Tea party

In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten opines today that the Tea Party will not last but will fall due to its inherent nuttiness. Imagine, he exclaims, the people actually want to go back to the Constitution and enforce its provisions. There is no way that can last according to Rutten.

Rutten's piece is actually another manifestation of the ideas put forward by Joe Klein in Time. Klein castigates America as a diseased society that idolizes ignoramuses. In other words, Klein abhors the idea that the American people get to choose who they think should run the country and they are not choosing the so-called "experts" that Klein likes. Or put even more simply, Klein is upset that the progressive elites are losing the control that they have come to enjoy. Rutten is sure that once the control is lost to the ignoramuses, all hell will break lose and the country will bring back those progressive elites in 2012.

This is the kind of anti-democratic garbage that has come out each time that the Democrats have lost an election. George Bush was an ignorant hick. Ronald Reagan was derided as a lazy ignoramus. Newt Gingrich was a reactionary who would undermine the entire country and who would lead to the quick exit of the Republicans from power.

I have come to realize that when these articles appear, the Democrats are in despair. They do not believe that there is anything wrong with their ideas which the country has rejected. No, it has to be that the country is too stupid to understand those ideas. Indeed, the essence of the Democrats view of the American people is that they are stupid and child-like, and that they need to be controlled by experts in Washington who will arrange the people's lives for them. The Democrats are not in favor of individual responsibility; they want responsibility with the government.

Fortunately for the USA, the Democrats' ideas are not shared by a majority of the citizens of this country.

One further note: with Obama in control and with huge majorities in both houses of congress, the Democrats spent their time enacting their old ideas. Economic problems were handled like they were in the 1930's with a major helping of political payoffs added in. Health care issues were pushed towards the solution of a national single payer system that has was first established in other countries some eighty years ago and which has failed whenever it has been tried. Energy and pollution was to be dealt with by a massive government intervention into the free market to drive costs up so high that energy usage (and the economy) would fall. This type of intervention comes right out of the old Soviet playbook for the destruction of private industry. There simply were no new ideas.

My guess is that the Tea party is not about to fold. True, once the country gets back on a sound economic footing, the impetus for the movement will be lessened. Nevertheless, these folks have learned what happens when the old ideas of the Democrats get into power. In the last two years, thos ideas almost destroyed this country. It will be a long long time before folks will trust the Democrats on those issues again. Indeed, my prediction is that the Democrats will have to change their philosophy before they will get another chance at control.