Two weeks ago, they were “porkulus” protests (I think they didn’t take off because the name was so sexy nobody wanted to protest it). A year and a half ago, they were anti-anti-war protests. There were sanctuary protests in San Francisco and anti-communist protests in Orange County, black pro-lifer protests at the DNC and Planned Parenthood protests in Denver. Jeremiah Wright got protested, as did Sean Penn; even protesters got protested, as did the New York Times.
The right wing has been protesting everything in the fucking world for the better part of the decade, and the same conservative bloggers and activists who’ve been showing up in 200-person groups in every major city in the country since Bush took office once again showed up in 200-person protests “across the country” in organized “Tea Party” protests. And again, conservative bloggers declared it the second coming of democracy, proudly bleating about the power and force of protests that usually had more passers-by than actual protesters.
So why are these protests being referred to by Mark Tapscott as a fundamental shift in the political power dynamic, when it’s just another in a long line of ultimately pointless expressions of conservative frustration with the world, neither building on popular sentiment nor expressing a particularly popular or accessible belief?
Part of it is the fact that the Tea Parties are bought and paid for by the Koch family, and was a movement in search of a moment. But any number of conservative faux-populist movements have had significant funding and apparent popular support and have gone absolutely nowhere. So what’s driving these Tea Parties as some sort of important and momentous event in American politics?
Let’s start with Rush Limbaugh’s CPAC speech this weekend. Andrew Breitbart went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over the thing, citing it as a speech that could have altered elections, a speech that changed the very world in which we live and breathe. Tapscott mentions several excerpts of Limbaugh’s speech:
“‘It doesn’t matter to me what his race is. He’s liberal, and that’s what matters.’
“‘The racism in our culture was exclusively and fully on display in the Democrat primary last year,’ Limbaugh said. ‘We didn’t ask if he was authentically black. What we were asking, was, ‘Was he wrong?’ We concluded, ‘Yes.’ ‘
“‘The racism, the sexism, the bigotry that we are all charged with ... doesn’t exist on our side,’ he added. ‘We want everybody to succeed.’”
This, for some reason, is taken as a bold and forthright exposition on race, one that took on the Republican Party’s issues with Obama’s race and refuted them once and for all. Coming from Rush “Bone Out of the Nose” Limbaugh, this is like Mark Foley burying all doubts about his love of teenage boys by saying not once, not twice, but three times how untrue it is that he learned Final Cut to edit Joey out of all of his Dawson’s Creek DVDs.
The Republican Party and the conservative movement got their collective asses kicked by a Democratic movement that looked nothing like the people who’d been bullied around and cowed since 1994. And it’s a new and unexpected thing, changing the post-Republican Revolution narrative that was supposed to change politics for a generation. An unpopular radio host spoke to a small gathering of rabid conservative activists, told them what they wanted to hear, and happened to do it on the same weekend that a handful of small protests convened around the country against a bill which the American public largely support. Their argument is laden with the heavy conservative narrative of paranoia and convoluted backstory, simultaneously reinforced and denied as inklings of their own futility seep through.
The conservative movement, however, is aided by one thing and one thing only - a media which views, at all times, the conservative viewpoint as the one which motivates and drives debate in America. If Democrats had put together tiny protests in early 2001, and Ed Schultz had spoken to 9,000 people at a MoveOn event, it would have been derided as the last gasp of a party left rudderless after a crushing electoral defeat, and Tony Blankley and JC Watts would have told us exactly why it was so bad for liberals. The conservative machine excels at one thing anymore, and that’s getting its chosen message on cable news and Sunday shows (when they have a message to get there). However, making fart noises and calling it the Gettysburg Address only gets you so far.
Oh, and from Tapscott:
And, as examples of the flash crowd phenomena, the Tea Party Protests are graphic proof that the Right is beginning to get it concerning New Media and its capacity to focus political movements.
What the fuck is it these people think Twitter does? Did Obama find the 140 Characters of Destiny?
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Jesse dives into the echoing cesspit so we don’t have to.