One Word Turns the Tea Party Around

[FourScore]

Mon Aug 15, 2011 at 10:40 AM PDT
One Word Turns the Tea Party Around
by Pericles

There's a simple word-replacement that turns Tea Party rhetoric into Progressive rhetoric: Do a search-and-replace that changes "government" to "corporations".

Did you ever watch one of those football blooper reels, where guys run for touchdowns in the wrong direction? Sometimes they look really good doing it: fast, agile, determined. None of their teammates can catch up and turn them around.

This last year or two I've been feeling that way about the Tea Party -- not the corporate lobbyists who run the organizations or the billionaires who fund them, but the rank-and-file types who wave signs and bring their babies to rallies. A few are the stereotypic gun-toting racists, but a lot of others are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:

Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
Our democracy is threatened.
The public is told a lot of lies.
People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
If we stand together, we're not as helpless as we seem.

I could go on, but you get the idea. They're on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren't running the wrong way.

How they should turn around is pretty easy to describe. Tea Partiers think:

The threat to our way of life comes from government, and the solution is to shrink government while freeing corporations from government control.

Just flip government and corporations in that sentence:

The threat to our way of life comes from corporations, and the solution is to shrink corporations while freeing government from corporate control...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/15/1007145/-One-Word-Turns-the-Tea-Party-Around?via=siderec

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. I like this idea! K&R.

[The Traveler]

2. The problem is

and a great many Tea Partiers understand this ... the problem is that government has been co-opted by corporations!

Now, the problem is their solution is to give up on government. My solution is to cleanse government of corruption, and construct additional safeguards against the undue influence of money.

[LuvNewcastle]

4. Corruption is our biggest problem.

If you take money out of politics, most of our problems fix themselves.

[The Doctor.]

7. You employed the phrase; "Tea Partiers Understand".

That is abject idiocy from the outset. Then to suggest that the idiots riled up by corporations know that corporations are the problem defies all reason or observation.

In other words;

:wtf:


Where the hell have you been that you are without a damn clue?

[The Traveler]

11. My, how doctrinaire!

Perhaps you are the clueless one in this discussion. In any event, you are certainly appear to be ill equipped to participate in thoughtful discussion. Manners. Learn some before you go out in public. Less embarrassing that way.

Where have I been? Around and about ... and listening.

As to the topic, the "Tea Party" is not as monolithic as you think, and not all of them are the mindless idiots we have grown accustomed to enduring on cable news. It is a relatively loose movement of people who hold a spectrum of world views but tend to share a) a propensity for alarm and fear and b) a preference for poor sources of information. I am fairly convinced that the only thing that has held it together this long is a lot of infrastructure and investment put together by the likes of the Koch brothers.

Like it or not, many of them are very well aware of the manner in which government functions have been "captured" by moneyed interests. In their view, regulation becomes a tool of those interests (and that I do believe that happens) and this leads them to the view that regulation is therefore evil. When I asked them, "Without government regulation, how then do you have any means to prevent corporate malfeasance?" The answer: Rote, blind faith in the power of free markets to resolve those kinds of things. That kind of faith doesn't just happen ... it takes indoctrination. (I regard indoctrination as one of the principle functions of Fox News, etc.)

But I have noticed in many of the TP'er's of my acquaintance around these parts that their faith has been deeply shaken. The cognitive dissonance required to support the corporatist line while despising government for being subject to corporate influence is becoming a heavy burden to bear, especially in recent weeks. And strains are showing up between the free marketers and the "social conservatives" wings of the movement. The recent debt ceiling struggle has done a lot to produce the pressures necessary to expose these fault lines.

If you want to defeat an opponent, you have to understand that opponent. The "Tea Party movement" has a demographic structure, and that structure is actually relatively fragile ... which means it can be fractured. Indeed, we see signs of it fracturing all over the place.

[Firebrand Gary]

3. It is the truth, we need to reframe the entire debate moving forward.

I posted this the other day referring to a statement from Senator Coburn.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1742274&mesg_id=1742345

[Zax2me]

5. Okay - would one word flip progressives around?

Using this writer's example, I just flipped things on him.


Progressives think:
The threat to our way of life comes from corporations, and the solution is to shrink corporations while freeing government from corporate control...

Just flip government and corporations in that sentence:
The threat to our way of life comes from government, and the solution is to shrink government while freeing corporations from government control.


One word, right?!
I don't think Pericles thought this thing through before he wrote it! If I were him, I'd take it down and start all over.

[FourScore]

6. Except that corporations are the threat, not government.

That's kinda the point.

[JohnnyRingo]

8. Kick for common sense

[Gregorian]

9. Brilliant!

Absolutely nails it.

I woke up this morning with the phrase "corporate elections".

[HCE SuiGeneris]

10. K & R

:applause: