Andrew Sullivan on Tea Parties

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish struggles to get a handle on what the Tea Party demonstrations hyped by Fox News are really about. He offers and then dismisses the following possibilities:

1) The bank bail-outs begun by Bush and continued by Obama (are they advocating allowing the banks to fail?)

2) Tax increases on the wealthy that have yet to be instituted (Obama campaigned openly on this policy and most of those affected voted for him. Besides, how many of those participating look like they come from that group?)

3) Against illegal immigration (Obama has made no specific immigration reform proposals and why tea-bags?)

4) Against budget deficits (where were they when the GOP controlled White House and Congress ran up deficits over the last eight years?)

Sullivan notes the utter lack of any alternative policy proposals from these protests and speculates that they aren't really about policy at all in any coherent sense.

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

--Ballard Burgher