See reply to John Burnham (assuming it ever get out of moderation): The Tea Party is an Obama Era phenomenon. The TP generally refers to the movement that grew up to oppose the Obama agenda, or supposed Obama agenda, and took on the name in the period following Rick Santelli's famous rant against the "new admninistration" and its interest at the time (early 2009) in aiding distressed homeowners with money from "responsible homeowners" like Rick and his friends.
Ron Paul has been Ron Paul for a very long time, and has never been the same as the Tea Party. Whether his libertarian far right fusionism anticipated the TP in any critical respects a complicated discussion, but the fact remains that very few self-identified Tea Partiers have ever supported Ron Paul: People like Palin and Bachmann turned the TP into a home for Terror-Warring Christian Zionists and supply siders, not hard money isolationists.
Reactionary conservatism and its critique of Bush/Cheney both in its "compassionate conservative" and "neoconservative" aspects pre-existed the Tea Party, which is an Obama Era phenomenon.
The TP has inconsisently and unevenly adopted elements of the hardcore conservative critique of Bush/Cheney Era Republican policy. I don't think you'll find a consistent TP position on the "War on Terror," for instance. The larger point is that the TP came together under and in reaction to Obama and the brief Democrat ascendancy, and for some of the same reasons that the activist liberal-left could flourish in opposition to Bush.
It would be a lot easier for Marsh and other would-be further-leftists if Obamism really was equivalent to Bushism. It's easy to perform an abstract exercise that seems to prove that Obama might was well be Bush or Romney in relation to some set of privileged issues, or perhaps to subjective opinions about what Obama supposedly promised or represented in 2008 or ought to be able to campaign on in 2012.
A key problem is that concretely the party organization and networks represented by Obama and the DP command, and have much to offer to, a very large majority of all potential sympathizers to a further-left movement. That fact already suggests a radically different practical organizational as well as theoretical challenge compared to some attempt to emulate the TP, except from the left.
Marsh's contortions and contractions are typified to me in one incidental sentence: "George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party." In brief: W's not completely irrelevant to the TP, but, even as shorthand, "George W Bush inspired the rise of the TP" comes across as rather utterly clueless, just as Marsh's posturing comes across as rather utterly pointless. If you're going to seek space to Obama's left, have at it, but divorced from a coherent and persuasive analysis and a practical plan of action, it's just vain and reactionary wanna-be leftism.
See reply to John Burnham (assuming it ever get out of moderation): The Tea Party is an Obama Era phenomenon. The TP generally refers to the movement that grew up to oppose the Obama agenda, or supposed Obama agenda, and took on the name in the period following Rick Santelli's famous rant against the "new admninistration" and its interest at the time (early 2009) in aiding distressed homeowners with money from "responsible homeowners" like Rick and his friends.
Ron Paul has been Ron Paul for a very long time, and has never been the same as the Tea Party. Whether his libertarian far right fusionism anticipated the TP in any critical respects a complicated discussion, but the fact remains that very few self-identified Tea Partiers have ever supported Ron Paul: People like Palin and Bachmann turned the TP into a home for Terror-Warring Christian Zionists and supply siders, not hard money isolationists.
Reactionary conservatism and its critique of Bush/Cheney both in its "compassionate conservative" and "neoconservative" aspects pre-existed the Tea Party, which is an Obama Era phenomenon.
The TP has inconsisently and unevenly adopted elements of the hardcore conservative critique of Bush/Cheney Era Republican policy. I don't think you'll find a consistent TP position on the "War on Terror," for instance. The larger point is that the TP came together under and in reaction to Obama and the brief Democrat ascendancy, and for some of the same reasons that the activist liberal-left could flourish in opposition to Bush.
It would be a lot easier for Marsh and other would-be further-leftists if Obamism really was equivalent to Bushism. It's easy to perform an abstract exercise that seems to prove that Obama might was well be Bush or Romney in relation to some set of privileged issues, or perhaps to subjective opinions about what Obama supposedly promised or represented in 2008 or ought to be able to campaign on in 2012.
A key problem is that concretely the party organization and networks represented by Obama and the DP command, and have much to offer to, a very large majority of all potential sympathizers to a further-left movement. That fact already suggests a radically different practical organizational as well as theoretical challenge compared to some attempt to emulate the TP, except from the left.
Marsh's contortions and contractions are typified to me in one incidental sentence: "George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party." In brief: W's not completely irrelevant to the TP, but, even as shorthand, "George W Bush inspired the rise of the TP" comes across as rather utterly clueless, just as Marsh's posturing comes across as rather utterly pointless. If you're going to seek space to Obama's left, have at it, but divorced from a coherent and persuasive analysis and a practical plan of action, it's just vain and reactionary wanna-be leftism.