Trivia

They are a minority, but they have kidnapped the country’s public discourse. They do not even represent a quarter of Congress, but they have the capacity to paralyze national development. Within their own party, they generate divisions and mark as traitors those who were elected to public office under the same flag for the simple reason that they vote differently or are not in agreement with their opinions.

They discredit, insult and make fun of the president. Those who are not in their fraction — not to mention their party — are marked as accomplices to horrible crimes. Neither discussions nor agreements are possible with them. In more profound debates, even when their rivals say that they are right and adjust legislative packages, they vote against them. Some of their representatives are embarrassing and the most serious and independent analysts ask themselves how it is possible that they might have arrived at their positions.

They have one or two methods of preferred communication. They consider all others part of a dysfunctional system. They follow a handful of media sources, considered extreme by the majority of the public opinion, and it seems to them that they are the only ones who “tell the truth.”

Their speeches are discrediting and inflammatory, and personal against individuals who have then been assaulted by the very fundamentalists that they generated. Their outcry against this type of politically motivated violence is lukewarm, in a way that seems to justify it.

They consider themselves the only ones morally chosen to save the country from its deficiencies. However, their own proposals are built on false data (“the whole world has the right to their own opinion, put not to their own statistics”) and when they govern they do not put into practice what they have raised in their speeches.

They do not have ideas. They have slogans. They are not capable of arguing, only of repeating. When faced with a piece of data, a question, a criticism, they respond with a pre-scripted phrase that sounds good, that tries to say everything but in reality does not say anything. Their followers are more like fanatics and actively use the internet as a means of propaganda and attack.

I am referring to the tea party, the ultra-right-wing fraction of the already conservative Republican Party of the United States. In this week’s edition of Time magazine, this is how they were painted by Michael Crowly in his piece “The Triumph of the Tea Party” in honor of the debate over raising the debt ceiling of the United States.