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the article dippin linked to above makes the obvious point, the one that's been made repeatedly by analysts from different areas of the political spectrum (populist conservatism aside of course)--which is that the movements themselves shaped by (depart from & refer back to) the situation of the republican party and, within that, to the particular situation of the coalition that the republicans stood to benefit from that pulled in the far right. this has a pretty definite history---it got underway in earnest during the clinton period, but it's origins extend well before that.
the aim of the movement is, as i've said before, dominating news cycles. the strategy is to generate a sense of loss of momentum for the image of obama.
so what matters is that the teabagtypes get television coverage, not so much what they say. what matters is that cameras turn to them. what this presupposes is that conservative actions get press exposure in ways that have no correlate for anything on the left such as it is.
for many years, a lynchpin of conservative political discourse has been projection: anything conservatives do is staged as a reaction to, or is legitimated with reference to, something that happens from it's mirror image in "the left". so it is with the astonishing amount of press coverage that's been lavished on a movement that seems to me entirely incoherent. to maintain the illusion of "the liberal press"---source of much of the right's misfortune in the land shaped by it's internal language---there has to be no particular difference in amounts of coverage between these actions and any other. that this is materially false is beside the point.
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conservative language is a funny thing. you can gather information and assemble a pretty good idea of how it's going to be used at any given point. the language is pretty compact and is predicated on generating a clear us/them distinction. this distinction repeats at most other registers.
it's not surprising that folk who mobilize around that language don't inhabit the cognitive space shaped by it at all times, and that talking as individuals there'd be considerable variation in how x or y thinks.
but we're talking about an organized political action here. we're talking about a collective action that relies on certain common assumptions. we're talking about an organized action that is strange because there's no agreement as to what the issue at hand really is. there's no particular problem with talking about the actions as actions.
but i think most of the tfp conservative folk know this full well---for example, even though roachboy and many folk argue about stuff on different grounds and sometimes in a kinda heated manner, i expect that any could have a beer one on one and things would be fine, and quite different than these discussions.
but this is obvious.
it's been obvious.
you can talk about how an action is organized and not make statements about the attitudes of every individual who supports that action.
but if we all know that, then what's the point of all the snippy posts here complaining about how misunderstood this or that individual conservative feels for apparently feeling lumped in with the teabaggers (an expression i like)?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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