Is this good news from bad messengers?
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The Gadsden flag (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The
The following article comes from Brietbart’s Big Government. Taken from the writings of a couple of progressive “misses,” the message seems to be good news for Tea Party sorts and regular conservatives, but perhaps not so much for liberals, progressives and main-stream or establishment Republicans.
Of course being progressives from Harvard, the originators of the supposition of a long-lived Tea Party movement had to insert their obligatory thoughts (opinions?) about radicalism and prejudice against minorities among the Tea Party members. We know by now that that old dog won’t hunt and never has.
Just below is the first part of the Brietbart piece followed by a link to the rest and links to related articles.
HARVARD PROF: TEA PARTY NOT GOING ANYWHERE, MORE LIKELY TO WIN
by TONY LEE 29 Dec 2013
A government and sociology professor at Harvard writes that the Tea Party is more likely than not to “win in the end” in an age when Americans are becoming more removed from Washington and distrusting the federal government and their elected officials.
“Tea Party forces will still win in the end,” Theda Skocpol writes, unless moderate Republicans can defeat them. Skocpol concedes that the Tea Party “will triumph just by hanging on long enough” as Americans are getting fed up by “our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.”
The article, “Why The Tea Party Isn’t Going Anywhere,” was first published in the journal Democracy, and later reprinted in The Atlantic.
Despite the fact that Democrats, the mainstream media, and the Republican establishment again were predicting the “demise of the Tea Party” immediately after the government shutdown ended, Skocpol doesn’t believe so.
“But we have heard all this before,” she writes. “The Tea Party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony.”
Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson published a book in 2011 that “showed how bottom-up and top-down forces intersect to give the Tea Party both leverage over the Republican Party and the clout to push national politics sharply to the right.”
“At the grassroots, volunteer activists formed hundreds of local Tea Parties, meeting regularly to plot public protests against the Obama Administration and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates at all levels,” they found. “At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this Tea Party upsurge.”
Though Skokpol and Williamson have their typical biases and describe the Tea Party movement as a “radical” one that may not like minorities–without any evidence of that assertion–they acknowledge that “even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots” and outside groups that support the movement “wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates.”
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