From a September 17, 2010 Wall Street Journal article by Peggy Noonan entitled Why It’s Time for the TEA Party: “Local tea parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It’s more detached than that. They don’t say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction.
Nobody knows how all this will play out, but we are seeing something big—something homegrown, broad-based and independent. In part it is a rising up of those who truly believe America is imperiled and truly mean to save her. The dangers, both present and potential, are obvious.
A movement like this can help a nation by acting as a corrective, or it can descend into a corrosive populism that celebrates unknowingness as authenticity, that confuses showiness with seriousness and vulgarity with true conviction. Parts could become swept by a desire just to tear down, to destroy.
But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They’ve lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if tea party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.
One difference so far between the tea party and the great wave of conservatives that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the latter was a true coalition—not only North and South, East and West but right-wingers, intellectuals who were former leftists, and former Democrats. When they won presidential landslides in 1980, ’84 and ’88, they brought the center with them. That in the end is how you win. Will the center join arms and work with the tea party? That’s a great question of 2012. To read the complete article click here.
And this from today’s article by Nick Brown in Big Government entitled “For the GOP, Moderate is Now the New Conservative:” “It’s unsettling that Republicans who claim to be conservatives or “Tea Party’ers,” can without a hesitation hand over their support to an individual who seems to have learned the definition of “conservative” from Dictionary.com. Republicans have spent 4 years lining up outside to protest the healthcare bill and now they are lining up inside to throw their nomination at the man who is responsible for the model for Obamacare.
In fact, most of the entire line up of candidates, whether they realized it or not, were moderates in some fashion. Being that there is no political ideology in political theory for the terminology “moderate” I can only determine that the modern Republican Party is represented by a form of Neo-Con.
These were the individuals the Tea Party was going to take the GOP back from. But if you go by the evidence of the actions of the individuals reelected and those voted into office only one of two things can be determined, and my appologies in advance for my bluntness, but:
1) Either the majority of the Republican Party is now represented by fiscal moderates and interventionists or some type of Neo-Con; or,
2) The party is represented by a majority of idiots who take to the streets and protest for one thing, but can’t rationalize how to apply that ideology to the appropriate candidate in the voting booth.
One has to realize that many of the founders of American NeoConservatism were Democrats. The whole movement, which arguably could be traced back some 60 years, but at a minimum to the 1980’s has moved the entire American political spectrum left. NeoCons are what Democrats were 33 years ago. The Democratic Party has transitioned into a party of progressive socialist principles and instead of conservatives in the GOP holding their ground they have additionally taken a step to the left to replace the spot where the Democrats once stood while those of us promoting liberty seem to be doing so with a shrinking audience.
Read the full article here.