Tuesday, June 3, 2014

GOP candidate reveals Tea Parties' true motivation

You can read the rest of this article about one of the last "Republican Establishmentarians" fighting (albeit passively) for his political life, but what I found fascinating was this frank admission from Tea Party challenger, Glenn Beck/Breitbart darling and Senator wannabe Chris McDaniel of Mississippi [emphasis mine]:

McDaniel, however, routinely casts his mission not as a break with the past but as a bulwark against a frightening future."Millions in this country feel like strangers in this land," he says. "An older America is passing away. A newer America is rising to take its place. We recoil from that culture. It’s foreign to us. It’s offensive to us." This is a remarkably frank declaration of the vision of the Tea Party embraced by liberal social scientists: an expression, above all, of old white people's anxieties at the prospect of an urbanizing, liberalizing, diversifying America.

Tea Partiers can talk all they want about being for smaller government and fiscal conservatism -- they are -- but that's not what really drives them emotionally, it's not what gets their back up. 

It's the "culture wars" -- more precisely, the demographic destiny of America -- that alternately worries and infuriates them. 

America is getting less white and more liberal and this trend will only continue. The old white Tea Parties know it and it drives them nuts.


By Molly Ball
June 3, 2014 | The Atlantic

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