#signed-me-again

Hey, it’s fine! I’m mostly just trying to get some Content (TM) here, so... any questions are welcome. Caveat here: I was a teenager for the brunt of this, and I was a young teenager at the beginning of this. (I was only a sophomore in high school when it really kicked off and I started following it.) In my head, some things are mixed up- I did a little bit of fact-checking to make sure I got the dates right, and it turns out I didn’t at all. Also, I was never involved on the ground level, because I was a young teenager in a rural area and didn’t have the opportunity to do things like ‘go to protests’; most of my involvement was liking things on facebook. 

WARNING: Long post is long, and I don’t want to put this under a cut in case I have to change my URL. If you don’t want to read this, you can press the ‘J’ key to skip down (or just... swipe, I guess. Sorry, mobile users.) 

...So. Around the time President Obama got elected, a lot of conservative types were angry in the same way we are about Trump, and for nearly the same reasons (though, of course, they were wrong). They thought, thanks to right-wing media/propaganda, that Obama was an illegitimate president who was hiding all kinds of things from the American people and that he should never have gotten into office at all and that he was going to send the country to hell. And that was the people who weren’t flagrantly racist. 

 This was right after the 2008 financial crisis and no one was happy with how the government was handling the situation on either side of the political fence. Everyone wanted to see the banks punished for screwing people over, and under both Bush and Obama, that ... wasn’t what happened. The government in general let the banks off easy and gave them what they asked for so that the economy didn’t crash even harder. People were pissed off. 

A number of grassroots protests happened. Most of them were not very successful, but the one that caught people’s attention was an anti-tax, anti-bank-bailout, anti-government-meddling-in-the-economy libertarian deal. It was technically ‘bipartisan’ - in that libertarians on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide were involved. I don’t remember too much about this one in specific- I was honestly more interested in the ‘juicy’ culture war stuff- but everyone on both sides of the fence talked about it for months. 

The movement that sprung up around it was called the Tea Party-- after the Boston Tea Party, but TEA also stood for ‘Taxed Enough Already’. People started using Revolutionary-War imagery, hanging tea bags off their hats, that kind of thing. I think this is also when libertarians started using the Don’t Tread On Me flag, though that could have been just ‘I was a wee babby and this was the first time I was seeing it’. 

 ...And at the time? I was really hopeful. It was really obvious that things were wrong, and anyone that had eyes to see could see it, even if we blamed different things for it. I thought this would be a thing that would get liberal and conservative people to come together to fight the Real Evil of taxes and bad government regulation. I thought that maybe it really would be bipartisan and people would do the ‘right’ thing and make a change in the world.

...of course, that isn’t what happened at all. 

What happened was, conservative news media picked up on it and started touting it as an example of how much people hated Obama. People who hated Obama for other, much more dubious reasons glommed onto the Tea Party as a way of expressing their displeasure. Conservatives who hated Bush for ‘compassionate conservativism’ also glommed onto the Tea Party-  they wanted the government to get out of the business of even pretending to help people. Then conservative media started going ‘see? see how p o p u l a r  this Totally Bipartisan movement is? clearly everyone hates Obama as much as we do.’ 

A lot of Very Serious Moderate-Conservative people started freaking out about the Tea Party and trying to discredit them- as far as I remember, some of this may have been true. There were all kinds of rumours that the Koch brothers were funding them or that they were taking money from kooky right-wing candidates everyone hated or- in general, that there was some evil mastermind behind all this, that people weren’t rising up on their own because they were pissed off, that’s not a thing that HAPPENS, right? But happen it did. 

So what happened was... a libertarian, vaguely-populist movement quickly spiralled out of control. Egged on by conservative media-- and by the general disdain they got from more ‘liberal’ media outlets-- it turned into a ‘I’m More Conservative Than Thou’ heckfest.  

If the American right has learnt anything from the American left, it’s purity politics. This is when you started seeing the term RINO sprout up. RINO stands for ‘Republican In Name Only’ - in plain English, an actual conservative rather than a right-wing radical. The Tea Party popularized the term ‘RINO’ as meaning ‘anyone who doesn’t support the Tea Party or doesn’t support the increasingly radical direction it’s going’.

The Tea Party, at its various levels, started funding state and local elections- going against moderate Republican incumbents, and putting more right-wing candidates in their place. At the time, I thought this was great too- it was Putting Strong Good People who Believed All The Right Things In Places Where They Could Change The World. 

...the thing was? The Tea Party is directly responsible for how crazy the Republican party is right now. And I’m horrified at even the little bit I did to cheer it on, but no one thought things would wind up like this. At least, not in 2008. 

There’s a slang term in politics- ‘red meat’ - that means ‘the stuff your political base, your True Believers, rabidly care about that no one else really gives a damn about’. For instance, most people would not care about a proposal to tear down a statue of Columbus in the middle of town and replace it with.. IDK, a Little Free Library. For liberals/leftists, that might be a piece of red meat- replacing a statue of a genocidal maniac with a library? How wonderful! On the flip side, for conservatives, this might be a piece of red meat- how DARE you replace a statue of a NATIONAL HERO with some Weird Liberal Thing that will COST TAX MONEY!!!1!! But no one else really gives a damn, or has mixed opinions. 

The Tea Party was all about giving conservatives red meat. And very little else, to be frank, because it was a populist movement. The conservative base had never really chosen candidates on how effective they’d be, they were always more focused on what their candidates believed than what they actually Did- but the Tea Party made them go nuts. They didn’t have to care about the candidates their party chose (based partly on how effective they’d be)? They could pick whoever they wanted? Well, that guy believes aliens built the pyramids, but he also says he’ll outlaw abortion and gay marriage, so why the hell not? 

Tea Party candidates got crazier and crazier until you wound up with people like Sarah Palin seriously being considered for high office- candidates who would never wind up on the national stage before. Moderate Republicans were terrified. People thought the Tea Party was gonna become its own third party and be a real threat to the Republicans-- moderate ‘pubs either quietly became Democrats or started making the same kind of promises the Tea Party candidates were making.

I’m not sure if the Tea Party is still extant- I stopped hearing much about them in 2011, but that’s also the year that I stopped obsessively reading conservative news media, so they could still be around. As far as I know, the movement as a movement has basically quieted down. Maybe it was that people realized they looked silly wearing tricorne hats with tea bags hanging off them; maybe it’s that they were sick of getting called ‘teabaggers’; maybe it’s that the conservative media/mainstream media just stopped reporting on them once they stopped being new and shiny. Maybe they just switched to wearing MAGA hats.

...but the thing is, whether or not they won enough battles to stick around? They won the war.

Trump is the ultimate Tea Party candidate. He is all red meat and no vegetables or vitamins. He promises people the universe and then gives them a load of hot air for their trouble- and he puts on a great show. He gives them all the right words; all the best words. He hates taxes and government regulation-- he must, because he’s a successful businessman, right?  

Ugh. That got depressing quick. Let’s just get to...

THE TAKEAWAY, for anyone who’s read this far.   

The Tea Party is 99% of what radicalized the mainstream Republican party. I don’t think the alt-right would even be relevant if the Tea Party hadn’t paved the way for them. The Republicans started moving farther right by degrees long before the Tea Party, but the Tea Party accelerated the crazy- conservative pundits today say things that would be unthinkable even during the Bush administration.   

Voting can and does have measurable effects; it’s just that voting for President and Congress once every four years does not. You have to be willing to vote for local and state candidates, to primary candidates you hate, to be picky about who you support, but also to vote for candidates within one of the major parties. 

The Democratic Party does not give their base enough red meat. The Republican Party gives their base way too much red meat. This is why both parties are FUBAR- not giving your base enough red meat results in a shirty, disloyal, angry base that will betray you; giving your base too much red meat makes them stupid, petulant children. 

thepioden replied to your post   “yavieriel replied to your post  “hi tumblr i’m off work feeling...”

                       I DO know an IP lawyer who probably has enough Silm-by-osmosis from me to help you out if you wanted to make the law firm AU a reality.                    

THANKS but what I want is for someone else to do all the work while I sit back and snigger tbh? (would also be up for reading: Feanor and Fingolfin’s boundary dispute, probably.)

signed-me-again replied to your post  “In the radiance series, what do you think happens when Melian and...”

                       I was going to just write !!!!!!!!!!!! but it seems someone else has beaten me to it -_-                    

koramberlynne replied to your post   “In the radiance series, what do you think happens when Melian and...”

                       !!!!!!!!!!!!                    

aaaaa guys I’m glad people are still into it!! :D      

crocordile replied to your post   “What was the worst book you've ever read?”

                       Wow I absolutely can't pick which one sounds worse ����

squirrelwrangler replied to your post   “What was the worst book you've ever read?”

                       OH AACK! I read the first Ilium book and was...just..there's a nugget of an interesting pulp SF idea in here, but so much of it was gross or boring or terrible        

Shrek: Individually… honestly we’re each fairly straightforward, so… not really? As a system… well, w’ere a system. So yes.

Tag yourself: I actually asked about this one, and the answers consistently came back “at great length.”

We Are Number One: We’re queer and multiple, so… yes. We’d be villains. Looking at our individual characters… I think Eva would be a four-colour hero, I’d probably be a “somebody’s got to” hero, Ash is an unrepentant villain.

I'm so happy for you

<3 good luck