The Tea Party’s Path to Irrelevance

One of the things most notable about today's Republican Party is the embrace by the party base of ignorance, bigotry, and racism, the later being openly displayed by the push for voter ID laws to disenfranchise blacks and opposition to immigration reform which is openly anti-Hispanic.  Fueling this trend is the Tea Party and white supremacist Christofascists like The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  While the Tea Party/Christofascist overlap is not complete, some 85% of the Tea Party crowd describes itself as conservative Christian.  Both groups are fighting a rear guard battle against modernity and demographic changes that are irreversible.  It's a case of long term political suicide.  The only question is how long before these bigotry filled Neanderthals drag the GOP to irrelevance.  I would argue, not soon enough.  An op-ed column in the New York Times looks at the lessons the GOP ought to learn from history.  And by history, I mean real history, not Christofascist revisionist history.  Here are some column highlights:

THE Tea Party has a new crusade: preventing illegal immigrants from gaining citizenship, which they say is giving amnesty to lawbreakers. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, recently told Politico that his members were “more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”

They’re so upset, in fact, that Republican supporters of immigration reform, like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have become marked men in their party, while House Republicans have followed the Tea Party lead by refusing to even consider the Senate’s bipartisan reform plan. 

Tea Partyers often style themselves as disciples of Thomas Jefferson, the high apostle of limited government. But by taking the ramparts against immigration, the movement is following a trajectory that looks less like the glorious arc of Jefferson’s Republican Party than the suicidal path of Jefferson’s great rivals, the long-forgotten Federalists, who also refused to accept the inexorable changes of American demography.

The Federalists began as the faction that supported the new Constitution, . . . .   Culturally, however, they were identified with the ancient stock of New England and the mid-Atlantic . . .

The Federalists held together for the first few decades, but in 1803 the Louisiana Purchase — Jefferson’s great coup — drove a wedge between the party’s ideology and its demography. The national party was suddenly faced with a nation that looked very different from what it knew: in a stroke, a vast new territory would be opened for colonization, creating new economic and political interests, slavery among them. 

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they [the Federalists] argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years. Leading Federalists even plotted to “establish a separate government in New England,” 

Finally, in the fall of 1814, the Federalists convened the Hartford Convention to vote on whether to stay in or out of the Union. By then even the hotheads realized how little support they had, and the movement collapsed. And the Federalists, now scorned as an anti-national party, collapsed as well. 

Today’s Republicans are not likely to disappear completely, like the Federalists did. But Republican leaders like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Graham understand that a party that seeks to defy demography, relying on white resentment toward a rising tide of nonwhite newcomers, dooms itself to permanent minority status. 

The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them. 

The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten. 

I doubt that the Tea Party/Christofascists will learn from history.  Why? First because they don't know accurate history.  Second, because they are too wrapped up in the own supposed exceptionalism and ignorance to see the handwriting on the wall. When I see a vehicle locally that has a Tea Party license plate - Virginia allows all kinds of plates to generate money - I cannot help but think, why not put a bumper sticker on ones car that reads "I'm a cretin."