Tea Parties

Most Tea Party types will tell you that the ideas they express are their own, derived from getting the news, thinking about it, and by the sheerest coincidence arriving at the exact set of conclusions that the Republican Party leadership and its patrons want them to adopt.

This isn't necessarily stupidity. For example, I have one Republican friend with a very high IQ who believes most GOP talking points and tells me I've been brainwashed by the "MSM" (a Republican curse word meaning any news outlet to the left of Fox TV).

No, it's tribalism plus the peculiar human trait of believing that we aren't influenced by marketing, while anyone who doesn't think the same as us is the other side's sock puppet.

The stupid think this, and are easily led, of course, but intelligent people like my friend can be led as well, given sufficiently adroit propaganda, soaring eternally on the wings of vast wealth.

Also, women are generally more conservative than men (I don't mean they're Conservatives--just that they're more cautious; remember, if the tribe loses one fertile woman there will be fewer children next year, while the tribe could lose most of its men and still have as many babies next year). So when fear is instilled in them, their first impulse is to cling to the status quo and resist anything they perceive as changes.

Meanwhile, men are generally more aggressive than women, so when you scare them their first impulse is to attack what they think is their enemy, rather than engage in self-examination, or in considering and weighing alternatives. They're most likely to attack when they feel emasculated. Many men have died for their countries--but even more have died for their, um, male organs, once you strip away the layers of rhetoric and rationalization.

Put both atavistic responses together and you get the average Tea Party get-together, egged on by demagogues like Congressman Michelle Bachman, who called the Obama administration "gangsters."

And as I said in a previous post, we Democrats have pushed them into the Republican leadership's eager arms.

To boil down that post:

Tea Party person: We white working-class people have been shafted, and we're angry.

Democrat response: You're racists.
Republican response: You're right, and it's the Democrats who've shafted you. They've taken what's yours and redistributed it to foreigners and bums and blacks and Mexican illegal immigrants--everyone but you.

Tea Party person: Great. Now I know who the enemy is.

Democrat: But the enemy is the Republicans and their big business patrons--and you racist Tea Party types.
Republican: See, the Democrats hate you, so they're lying. And they're in cahoots with big business. [followed by factual warpage, such as the fact that Wall Street donates to Democrats whenever they think Democrats might win an election--and to Republicans as well, in hopes that they'll win, so that whoever wins they'll have their hooks into them; but the Republicans don't mention all that stuff of course].

Tea Party person: Right. Down with the Democrats and their bailouts of big business (and all those unwhite unAmericans)!

I'm not certain whether democracy itself can survive the use of state of the art psychology and sociology in the service of the richest--and most amoral--of the rich.