The Tea Party of old versus the Tea Party of today

Whatever infantile world some so-called libertarians are living in, it’s clearly not the world that the rest of us are breathing in. According to one author, the furloughing of 800,000 federal government employees hasn’t caused a tangible disruption within our society. Another chestnut is the old Tea Party fallback quote, “Obama’s…just pure distilled Marxism.” Not only can a man not be a system of thought, President Obama’s policies have come nowhere near socialism, let alone Marxism.

These common beliefs among the Tea Party base (i.e., government employees, on the whole, serve no critical function in our society and President Obama is a shady Marxist/socialist/communist (?)) have continued to be a distorted but nonetheless real set of beliefs that only increases in severity with each political move that President Obama makes. That is, President Obama can do no right in the eyes of some within the Tea Party movement.

As such, it’s no longer acceptable for President Obama to negotiate with a group of individuals who would no sooner trust our nation’s elected president than they would Joseph Stalin, a group of individuals who would no sooner honor their commitments to a deal(s) reached with President Obama than they would with the Devil.

Perhaps a big reason why we are even in an unnecessary situation of government shutting down is President Obama has handed this tiny group victories in the past, emboldening them to take ever more drastic steps. We’ll never know if this situation would have played out differently had President Obama held firm in the past.

The point is not to place blame at President Obama’s doorstep, however. It is to argue that the Democratic Party’s bending position to the crazies of America has left the door open for the kinds of drastic political moves that the Republican Party in the House is taking. If the Tea Party wants their voice to be heard, they better mediate through the saner elements in their party and let them filter what is and isn’t appropriate.

Government is about running the everyday affairs of society to ensure its longevity and prosperity, not to lay dynamite under its foundations and watch it crumble to pieces. The Tea Party of old was fighting a true monarch. The Tea Party of today is fighting a ghost manifested by its own fears of change and uncertainty. In an ironic twist, it is today’s Tea Party which is the real tyrant.