The Tea Party’s Revolt Against Reality

It's no coincidence that close to 85% 0f members of the so-called Tea Party identify as "conservative Christians."  In my view, that overlap is a key element in understanding the irrationality and extremism of the Tea Party.   The Christian Right - or Christofascists as I prefer to call them - base their lives and entire outlook on a fantasy world view.  Facts, objective reality - nothing matters.  It's all about protecting their house of cards faith system and seeking to institutionalize their many prejudices and hatreds towards those they deem "other."  In a column in the Washington Post Michael Gerson, someone who is no liberal, slams the GOP/Tea Party for its disconnect with reality.  Here are column excerpts:

If you can judge people by the quality of their enemies, one quality shared by many opponents of the tea party is their conservatism. Like many ideological factions, tea-party activists display a special intensity in fighting the “near enemy” — other elements on the right that don’t share their tactics. President Obama may be their ultimate foe, but conservative pragmatists are their rivals. And rivals are the more immediate problem.

So the Senate Conservatives Fund runs ads against Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and other solid Senate conservatives for opposing a counterproductive strategy to defund Obamacare. The circle of tea-party purity is drawn so tightly that it excludes Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) — some of the most reliably conservative members of Congress.

Tea-party populism, however, moved quickly beyond this point. We are no longer seeing a revolt against the Republican leadership, or even against the Republican “establishment”; this revolt is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality. Conservatives are excommunicated not for holding the wrong convictions but for rational calculations in service of those convictions. 

At least, the argument goes, Ted Cruz has some backbone. It is the political expression of pent-up anger. “If we’re going to fight,” says Michele Bachmann, “we need to fight now.” Few believe any longer that Republicans will be able to defund Obamacare in this session of Congress; it is the fight that counts. This is a word that crops up frequently in tea-party discourse. Not winning. Not strategy. Not consequences. The fight. 

Under normal circumstances, this faction — composing less than 20 percent of the House Republican caucus — might exercise a marginal influence. But we have the peculiar situation of a divided Congress and a weak president. The tea-party faction holds the margin of victory in a slim Republican House majority. Boehner has kept some semblance of order by appeasing it — an approach of diminishing utility. 

The problem for Republicans . . . . . is that factions are seldom deterred by defeat. Every loss is taken as proof of insufficient purity. Conservatives now face the ideological temptation: inviting an unpleasant political reality by refusing to inhabit political reality.