Time Magazine Foresees Tea Party Breaking Up

... Like the Beatles

by Tim Graham - December 27th, 2010 - NewBusters

Time magazine's failure to choose the Tea Party as its Person or Persons of the Year surely reflects a desire that they will cease to be significant any day now. David Von Drehle's "runner-up" article in its Person of the Year issue concluded the Tea Party has already peaked and is well on its way to collapse: "The Tea Party is a hot brand, but there's no one in power to enforce the trademark. Now that the bailouts are history and Democratic hegemony is broken, what does it stand for? It's a sign of the incredible velocity of politics these days that the colossus of 2010, a movement not even two years old, is already facing an identity crisis."

Though I do not foresee that a breakup is certain and I agree the Tea Party movement is unlikely to ever embrace Michael Bloomberg - there is some truth to the reality that the direction of the movement is currently difficult to define. There are signs of discord and internal anger between branches of the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.

At least one bit of irony in this article is leftists are now conceding that the Tea Party movement was never a top down evil plot concocted and directed by Dick Armey and a cabal of Republican insiders, which Pelosi and Reid repeatedly insisted that it was in its early days.

Nevertheless the recent attacks on the Tea Party movement by elements within the Republican Party does not imply that the "compassionate conservatives" have acknowledged the damage they did to our nation and the Republican Party by adopting the big government mantle of the left. The "compassionate conservatives" still believe in creating "more efficient" government entitlements. This group with its closely allied social conservative movement is still trying to create a right wing nanny state and will not easily abandon their power or their goals. That these goals are unrealistic in a nation facing bankruptcy does not seem to be accepted.

A large element of the Tea Party movement is composed of social moderates who are very uneasy with the social conservatives who ran them out of the Republican Party during the 90s. The fiscal conservative but social moderates who returned to vote Republican in 2010 have reopened old wounds. It will not be in either group's interest to tear into each other. Yet that can happen.

It is one of the worst aspects of our political life that single issue constituencies never see the overall picture. They are so blindly dedicated to their life's passion that there appears no way to get them to embrace any other issue no matter how important it is. The world's economy cannot sustain the totally abusive spending for excessive retirements and millionaire level health benefits paid to government workers. Welfare, government waste, useless employees that produce nothing and corruption are destroying our nation. Redistribution of wealth has reached a point where those who produce are refusing to produce. That is the point at which a nation collapses. And still those who are upset by same sex marriage and abortion refuse to see the crisis that we face is more important than their issue.

How these conflicts are resolved will determine whether the Tea Party movement continues to play a dominant role in 2012. Times seems to hope that the Tea Party movement will lose its impact. However one point that Time seems to have missed in their analogy with the Beatles. The music leaders the Beatles introduced, McCartney and Lennon, dominated music for the next generation.