Texas, The Epicenter Of The Tea Party
Always has been. Or, at least from the day Dick Armey became chair of Citizens For A Sound Economy in 2003. That’s Dick Armey, Republican from north Texas. CSE was a pretty nondescript political funding vehicle for the anti-tax movement when founded by the Koch brothers from nearby Kansas in 1984. But Army gave it brainy fire and brimstone, however plain spoken.
His plain speech hid his PhD pretty well and worked great with Tea Party types. And Armey quickly worked out a pretty brainy scheme to gain better funding as the 501c4 arm of the Koch operation a year later when he created the subsidiary organization, FreedomWorks. Koch managed the Americans For Prosperity Foundation. Thus the early launch of the Tea Party in 2004 in a Texas where a confluence of influences he readily recognized as a favorable climate for hard right ideology existed. And both Armey and Koch built alliances across the country as well.
A native libertarianism prevails among white, born and bred Texans….the don’t fence me in mentality. As well as a native and non-native racism among Texas anglos….against both black and hispanic Texans. Rural Texas white populists built great animus against railroads seizing their cattle land in west Texas and New York banks foreclosing on their cotton and timber land when they could no longer handle outlandish interest rates. The federal government supported both the rail and bank barons so they got a hate on for the feds too. A laissez faire capitalism is appreciated by both the oil industry and white transplants from places like Michigan and other rust belt states rushing to Texas to begin anew when the plants closed up there.
And then you have in the mix the conversion of previously pretty moderate southern baptists (the very people who gave Texas to Jimmy Carter in ’76), who among other things, once favored abortion theologically, to a more hard edged conservatism when the right took over their church/seminary leadership. Big churches became mega-churches preaching prosperity theology.
Add to that a Perot like populism, making money off the federal government but talking against it, just like the oil industry.
Armey began building their Koch funded/grassroots appearing movement and soon regional Texas anti-tax/government leaders emerged in places like Houston in the form of the King Street Patriots and True The Vote, whose racist agenda sold well in ex-urban and suburban Texas who resented the more ethnically diverse cities like Houston, Austin and Dallas where minorities and liberals dominated elections and city hall. As they refined their voter suppression tactics, they exported them with training and national organizers.
In 5 short years, the Tea Party was introduced nationally and the the stage was set nationally for the 2010 sweep of congressional seats and statehouses, after much field testing of the Tea Party idea with school board, county, city and state legislature elections. The defining event? The election of our first African American President. Was he raising taxes? No. Was he pushing a Black agenda? No. He was too busy saving the collapsed economy and trying to stem massive unemployment and bring home their kid’s broken bodies from stupid wars? Yes. All they saw was a Black man saving their sorry asses. This was simply somehow too much to take. An insult to the white people “who built this country”.
Then, in 2012, the Texas Tea Party elected Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate, the Tea Party’s wet dream. No, and it doesn’t end there. Virtually all the Texas state office and congressional candidates in the Republican party ran on harder right Tea Party planks and they took over most of the significant Republican Party offices at state and county levels. This includes the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party Chair seat, one of the biggest in the nation. And he is from my home precinct, where I kicked his ass for about ten years.
Have they peaked yet. Nope. This past Tuesday the Texas Tea Party won the nominations for their candidates for Governor, mentored by Ted Cruz, Lt. Governor and Attorney General. Cruz is flying high in Texas and Senator Cornyn, the senior Senator is sounding just like him. By the way, the whackiest of these, the Lt. Governor candidate, Dan Patrick is originally from Maryland and worked in Pennsylvania before migrating to Houston as a sportscaster and sports bar owner.
This Tea Party saga is far from over. Especially in Texas. I doubt it’s over nationally anytime soon as well. Texas is pretty good at exporting political ideas and creating national leaders. And their gun culture. Remember the book depository?
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The next time that some Texas wingnut threatens to secede from the union, I say we take them up on it.
In every liberal arguement their is a false premise. Populist infers texans are more racist than other parts of the country. I am a texan, born and raised(el paso) home to the 1966 ncaa basketball champs starting 5 black players. Does it every occur to populist that we just dont like socialism, and are taking strong measures to stop it
The Texan who ran for the GOP Presidential nomination last time had a summer place called “Niggerhead.”
Coincidence?
No, Rusty, that thought never does grow in a liberal mind. For one, they can’t get past the question as to why anyone would not like fairness, and why they would actively try to game the system so only the rich can get richer, the powerful more powerful? Why would anyone try to stop fairness, and eradicate equality? Why would anyone be against small business and entrepreneurship, Especially if they are American? But that is exactly what Conservatives do in practice.
What you call socialism, is simply nothing else than giving everyone a fair chance. Conservatism is nothing else than protecting those already wealthy and in power…
Why someone would choose to be a conservative and throw their lot into protecting the one-percenters, (what used to be the noble class in the old days), perhaps for a crumb or two is far beneath the dignity by which anyone with liberal tendencies would stoop to measure themselves …
Shorter Rusty: I have black
friendsbasketball players.Continuing on progressivepopulist theme for today, that Texans are racist because they don’t like President Obama’s policies, here is another example that progressivepopulist must have missed of obvious racism at West Point. The 2014 West Pointers are obviously much more racist than the 2008 West Pointers. (Hey, that can’t be true, last time I checked West Point was not in Texas)
http://freedomslighthouse.net/2014/05/30/west-point-reception-for-obama-vs-george-w-bush-quite-a-contrast-video/
What is going to happen to your race baiting argument after we elect Dr. Ben Carson President?
Not a liberal here.
No false premise – Texas IS the land of bullshit. A state where social, economic and political priorities are so out of line that the Mad Hatter would happily call the place home.
Please let them secede and we’ll throw Florida in for free.
Kavips, maybe I can’t speak for anyone else. But I can speak for myself. I don’t like socialism. I am not a prejudice person. I don’t believe that a 400 lb person who overeats, does not get proper exercise, drinks and smokes, should pay the same health care insurance rate as a 175lb person who has a proper diet and gets the proper amount of exercise and makes a conscious effort to live a healthy life style. Your secret word for socialism is fair for everyone, but it is not far for every one that the 175 lb person has to pay for the 400 lb persons health care. Capitalism rewards those who do good in life and are successful. Socialism rewards those who do bad in life and fail. I choose the system that rewards success, Capitalism, over the system that rewards failure, Socialism. It is that simple, has nothing to do with race!
Right, because the capitalist health delivery system is working so well in this country.
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
Please stay off my socialist roads while driving to my socialist beach this weekend.
SussexAnon, The capitalist health care system needed improvement, the socialist Obama care made it worse. We need to go back to a market based health care system. So, however bad you think the health care system was, obama care made it worse. Look at the va single payer system for an example, as I wrote in another post, I talked to my brother the other day, and he waited one year for his wheel chair from the va last year. Digest that for a minute, then tell me socialism is better than capitalism
Obamacare is fascist, not socialist. Requiring a person to do business with a corporate entity is not socialist.
So when the VA fails, its a single payer system failure. When the Capitalist system fails, its just “needs improvement.” Got it. There is no perfect system. Especially when one party (I will let you guess which) has zero interest in good governance.
But maybe, just maybe, you are on to something. The VA can take a page out of your capitalist playbook and turn down people for pre-existing conditions. That would save them big bucks, drop people from their rolls, streamline the system with only healthy people and charge COBRA rates for discharged veterans. Hey, it worked for the capitalist system, right?
There are plenty of single payer (and fascist) systems around the world that are doing far better at outcomes than our system. Both pre and post Obamacare. And since only one party was interested in fixing the system, we ended up with the republican idea (circa 1993) in the interest of compromise.
But please do call on gov’t to end medicare and medicaid. I am sure all the seniors in the country would just LOVE to pay market based premiums for their high risk age bracket.
I am sure your worldview has nothing to do with being from Texas.
Sussexanon, every liberal arguement is based on a false premise, there are zero single payer systems around the world that offer a better healthcare system than ours pre obama
obama care is socialism, it charges the young triple what it should to pay for the high health care cost of the elderly. That is socialism
Rusty, Tea Party Texans hate what they think is socialism and are racists; yes they can do both at the same time. I’ve done much hand to hand combat with them in Texas and my experience with this crowd gives me that insight. Up close and personal.
The dead giveaway of their racism is their silence in calling Bush, in the dying days of his killer Presidency, a socialist when he started his no strings attached bailout of collapsing capitalism his policies inadvertently created. Yet Obama, in the first months of his new Black Presidency, spent most of his time continuing to try to save a collapsing capitalism you seem to think was not the act of a committed capitalist but a socialist. And as a responsible capitalist, he put strings on his bailouts that Bush was not smart enough to initiate. And, as a committed capitalist, President Obama has not prosecuted the miscreants and crooks who gave us this economic collapse. Now, who is the capitalist and whose is the socialist? Your thinking is totally irrational.
Spending more on healthcare and getting worse results than every industrialized nation is not a false premise. It is a fact.
You can’t say “single payer sucks” and should never exist because of its problems and at the same time dismiss the free market problems as “needs improvement.” Unless you have a “false premise” world view that corporations and the free market always do the right thing.
Learn the definition of socialism.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
Again, Obamacare was a Republican idea in 1993 and was quickly dismissed as a “secret Kenyan Muslim commie socialist Marxist plot” to take over the healthcare system when that “guy that doesn’t think like an American” showed up and pushed the idea. So not only is your socialist premise incorrect, its being pushed by the same party that came up with the idea.
Sussexanon, the reason the president does not think like an american is because he is not an american. Last time I checked kenya was not in the americas