Why the Tea Party won't last - part 2

Even Your Name is From Hundreds of Years Ago.

You can’t fight progress. Ask the horse and buggy people, telegraph operators, heck even newspaper people if you can fight progress. Trying to go back to some previous time is not a recipe for success. In fact I’m trying to think of one successful retro-movement. I’m not talking about fads like bellbottoms coming back into style, I’m talking about real social movements. The only regressive movement that seems to have any success is the anti-gay marriage movement.

Homosexuals deserve to enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals, it’s an inevitability that they will be allowed to serve openly in the military and get married. Yet the forces against this progress seem to be successful, for most of the reasons that the Tea Party movement isn’t: They have a clear message (gays can’t get married or serve in the military), it’s mostly grounded in reality (gay people are real, but they aren’t trying to destroy marriage) and they have a clear goal (they have anti-gay marriage propositions and voting initiatives that they pass). But they are on the wrong side of history. Being gay isn’t a choice and it can’t be cured. So the reality is that a segment of our population is being denied equal rights. And the denial of rights to anyone is the wrong side of history.

Take Health Care, most other western nations offer their citizens some type of universal coverage. America is actually late to the game. And that government takeover the right talks about? All America is requiring is that all of its citizens purchase insurance from private insurance companies. The Hospitals will still be privately run (unlike England where they are state run) and there is no government insurance agency. Everything is still in the private sector. So once again the Tea Party movement isn’t grounded in reality.

Even Social Movements Need the Target Demographic

The final reason the Tea Party movement is going to fail is that it isn’t embraced by young people. Almost every major social movement, every revolution, every lasting social change is started or embraced by the younger generation. Even our revolution was made up of people mostly under 50, many under 40. Alexander Hamilton was 19-21 at the first constitutional convention. Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration. Martin Luther King, Jr was 26 when he led the Montgomery bus boycotts and 34 when he led the march on Washington. Rosa Parks may have been 42, but predating her on refusing to give up their seats was Irene Morgan, who was 27 (she helped overturn segregation on interstate bus rides), Sarah Keys (whose age I can’t find but she was a private in the Woman’s Army Corp), and just nine months before Parks infamous ride, Claudette Colvin a 15 year old refused to give up her seat on the same bus line. Heck, Jesus who you may know as the founder of Christianity, died in his early 30s.

What you aren’t seeing is a bunch of protests at college campuses in the name of the Tea Party movement. The Iranian election protests were on Twitter, students marched on Tianamen Square, Ron Paul is a major political name due to his popularity on college campuses. And of course there was this guy named Obama.

Some people know you have to get them when their young, it’s why the conservatives on the Texas school boards and Kansas school boards work so hard to stay in power. They can decide what the textbooks say, and can feed our children the version of the facts that best fit their ideology. (Funny that conservatives are the ones who claim that liberals “indoctrinate”, when it is conservatives who are literally rewriting school books.)

But what about the Tea Party?

Quick google search for tea party turned up quotes from a:
54 year old,a Retiree,  Guy who receives Social security, woman 67, man 50, 

And image searches don’t help much either. I had to really search to find anyone who looked under 40. Try it yourself, do a Tea Party Google image search. If you find a picture that is less than 50% people over 50 I’d be surprised (and children under 12 don’t count).

Even though the Tea Party will not last, it doesn’t mean it can’t make life hard on those of us trying to move the country forward. How can we speed up their demise? Do the exact opposite of what they’re doing: Have a clear message, have clear achievable goals, keep the young people energized and keep painting the Tea Party as the party of the past and ours as the party of progress. That’s how Obama got elected, how Clinton got elected, and it’s even how Reagan got elected. We have to remember that a majority of Americans (53%) elected Barack Obama. And every congressman was elected by of majority of their constituents. If the tea party movement represents a majority of the American people, then we’ll see that reflected in the polls, but if the Democratic majorities are any indication, the United States has been turning towards progress. If the Tea Party movement is still around in 2012, it won’t be because they’ve been successful, it will be because we’ve not worked hard enough to defeat them.

Joe R.