An alternative to the Chomsky view: this is, at heart, a racist white power movement

[tpsbmam]

http://www.truthout.org/white-racial-resentment-bubbles-under-surface-tea-party-movement56709

White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement
Friday 05 February 2010
by: Rich Benjamin | AlterNet

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in its Caucasian numbers but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

Editor's Note: Rich Benjamin's commentary on the underlying "white grievance" currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.

The Tea Party movement, holding its first convention this weekend, is angling to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and in deed, since at least the 1960s counterculture. Only this time, the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement's first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement's meteoric rise, and Palin's selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

more at link

[thunder rising]

1. Where is the Chomsky view comparison?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Link and discussion here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7654396&mesg_id=7654396

[thunder rising]

3. The quotes there are from Arianna Huffington, not Noam Chomsky. I have yet to see a Chomsky quote

[thunder rising]

4. Drilled down to ZMag and Chomsky doesn't address the teabaggers at all. So this is BS

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Yes he does

These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted."

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23178

[tpsbmam]

6. No, your "drilling" is BS....

If you'd just gone beyond the ZMag piece, you'd have seen that Chomsky did, indeed, say this and was talking about the tea baggers. Listen and learn and be less quick to put other people down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWs6g3L3fkU

[thunder rising]

9. So now we get yet another piece of the puzzle. Thank you ... and I agree with Noam.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. So it was 'BS' earlier, but now you've heard Chomsky speak it, you agree?

He's just restating in that YouTube interview what he said in the Diane Krauthamer one.

[secondwind]

7. Sarah's father said in an interview that she left the Univ. of Hawaii because she felt

"uncomfortable" around all the 'foreigners'!!

[Raschel]

12. Someone needs to find out info. on her old man. He's the nut case from whom(?) Sarah got her views

The guy seems really looney to me.

After all, if Pres. Obama's mom and dad are fair play, lets see what kind of egg Sarah was hatched from.

[corpseratemedia]

8. ths is how I've felt about the teabaggers, and my knowledge about one of them

who is married to someone I used to know

it's a white-power movement

the followers may be economically disenfranchised, but they are primarily racist in their motivation


and it needs to truthfully be identified as such

[boobooday]

10. "Take our country back"

All you have to do is finish that sentence with the "from whom" clause and their racism is clear.

[KG]

11. no kidding. they hated clinton, but it took the election of a brother to get them into the streets

[Raschel]

13. "Caucasian Tea Partiers" Is there any other kind?

[HipChick]

15. I believe that there will be token minorities used..

so they can say see, we are not racist.

I know of one person that joined that is a minority - he's sole mission is to get publicity for his music, he knows he can get on TV whatever he attends..