“These are desperate times for America, unless we have Tea Party Guardians protecting our values, we will fall. … The socialists who at one time felt emboldened now feel cornered and threatened. … The Globalists, with all their vast resources are organizing to fight Conservative Patriots, tooth and nail. The Army of Darkness will not be defeated easily; they lust for control of our beloved Nation. They know, if we falter on just one issue they can win all!”
And so begins a document drafted by the American tea party movement meant to generate donations from its “patriot” followers. The contradictory assertions, evident in their letter, are typical of a populist right-wing movement and indicate the political positions of this apparent absurdity on the U.S. political landscape that the tea party seems to represent.
In spite of proving themselves capable of identifying Wall Street’s role in the general crisis of the country, the tea party does not advocate that the government prevent the excesses of the great capital through its control. They attribute all evils and dangers to the “socialists,” or, according to them, all those who refuse to reduce the State’s role and properly support the “invisible hand” of the free market.
“Consider this fact, we are spending our resources faster than ever, just trying to stay ahead of the Socialists onslaught of greed. The fight is forcing us to travel to Washington to meet with decision makers, mail countless letters and make endless presentations,” the tea partiers point out in a petition for financial support for their campaigns.
“We fight with pennies, many times marching empty handed against immeasurable odds! All the while the Left-Wing Socialcrats bask in obese pools of ACORN type booty! We no longer can stand by and watch while U.S. Cities turn against law-abiding U.S. Citizens because Citizen Victims want to protect themselves, such is in the case of Arizona.”*
A right-wing populist movement is, according to theory, that which combines an anti-elitist position with an attempt to maintain or intensify a repressive social system that favors the privileged. To a large extent, they feed on the popular protests and complaints against the system they represent, seeking to redirect these hostile motivations toward some insignificant part of the privileged elite or against other groups falsely identified as such, especially the marginalized and oppressed who constitute extremely vulnerable, easy targets. These groups serve as scapegoats against those who attempt to channel popular struggles, in order to leave the elite that they essentially protect intact.
Against these scapegoats they successively apply strategies of marginalization, demonization and dehumanization to characterize the members of the chosen group as threatening, inferior, evil, sinful or possessed by the devil. They try to justify their accusations with stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination and other resources to dehumanize and demonize them, frequently using apocalyptic references that form part of a recurring central narrative in the religious, secular, political and cultural discourse of the United States.
Repressive right-wing populist movements are always galvanized by revolutionary movements for national liberation or social reform. They feed on the fear of liberals and the advance of liberal ideals.
Right-wing populism has a long history in the United States. The first of such movements, the Ku Klux Klan, originated after the Civil War as a counterrevolution to both the defeat of slavery and the mobilization and empowerment of the southern black population during Reconstruction (1863-1877), which sought to rectify unresolved issues from the war, in particular regarding the social reintegration of liberated blacks.
In fact, this type of populism is part of the myth that claims the “American people” are represented not by the working-class nor the rich, but the “middle class” or “simple folk” (not to be confused with simple-minded, a term they reject).
A large part of this movement consists of Caucasians, but it would be a mistake to identify right-wing populists or neo-Nazis as solely white, because they aren’t. The people that work to live have little education, don’t understand the society in which they live and generally react against the rich and educated.
They say, for example, that the gubernatorial candidate for the Republican Party in New Mexico is a woman of Mexican heritage who identifies with the tea party. However, like many other Hispanics in that state, she denies her national origin and is a very conservative, racist and anti-indigenous individual — probably in order to avoid facing discrimination herself.
* Editor’s Note: Punctuation and grammatical errors were present in the original, verified quotes.
You have it backwards. The Conservative Republican party, the party of Lincoln and until the Democrat party’s KKK started murdering blacks for voting Republican, the party of the black community has always promoted civil rights.
Once the black community got the message, “vote Democrat, or else” most have been obediently voting Democrat ever since. Democrats repealed all of the Civil Rights legislation that the Republican passed after the Civil War and continued to oppose civil rights, while the right-wing conservatives fought FOR civil rights for the next century. The Civil Rights legislation that was passed in the 60’s was legislation written by right-wing conservative Republicans in the 50’s, but which the majority, liberal, progressive Democrat party, including JFK, voted against. Only when threatened by the violence of riots did JFK relinquish and crawl to the Republicans asking them to please proceed with their old, very old civil rights legislation.
Since the 60’s the communist/socialist spin machine has been lying to the world, and now, the conservative, right-wingers are finished with the lies and will set things right…no pun intended.
Best regards,
gspurlock
http://www.backyardfence.wordpress.com