So, The Tea Party movement. Another opportunity for liberal British commentators to 'play to their base' by taking lazy shots at white Americans. Our comedians and commentators are even more comfortable mocking Americans than they are mocking Christians. If they have a chance to mock Americans who are also Christians, as they do here, it's like all their secular winter solstice celebrations have come at once.
For what it's worth, I don't agree with the majority of what constitutes the Tea Party's incoherent, diffuse manifesto. Fuelled by a high calorie, low-brow diet of deep-fried fast food & deep-fried Fox News, most Tea Party activists seem misinformed & wrong-headed at best, deeply and dangerously bigoted at worst. But as dumb as their politics might be- and this is where the UK needs to think twice about knee-jerk reactions to the Tea Party - at least it proves that the American people remain fully engaged with their nation's political process. At least these people still care. They still believe that people have the power to alter the national political landscape. We shouldn't be sneering at a country that produces a movement like the Tea Party - we should be envious of a Western democracy whose citizen's are still motivated enough by politics to take grass-roots action.
The British public gave up on thinking they can make a difference through political action a long time ago. We are a compliant, jaded people. The coalition slice and slash away at public sector budgets, and we do nothing. We suffer, while City Bankers who caused that suffering continue to take mega-bonuses, and we do nothing. Thinking Obama is a muslim is stupid, but engagement with your nation's politics is admirable. Rather than ill, it would infact speak well for our country if we had our own UK Tea Party to ridicule.
5 comments:
Hi Paul,
Great to see you blogging again!
Your views on the tea party are pretty much in line with my own - some of them are undoubtedly bigots, conspiracy nuts and borderline racists, but at least they're engaging with the political system. I stayed with some relatives in New England last year, all of them staunch republicans, and was deeply impressed by the passion and anger they felt towards the state of their nation, even though most of their views were fairly unpalatable for a bleeding heart liberal like myself. We wear our cynicism like a badge of pride in Blighty, but I sometimes wish we could have a little more naivety towards our politics, if only so we can allow ourselves to get properly angry at our hopeless, interchangeable governments.
A movement like the Tea Party could never happen here, of course, mainly because any view outside the centre ground, either left or right, is treated with moral outrage by our sensationalist media. I suppose that our centre-ist instincts have given us stable and socially-minded governments for over a hundred years, but blimmin' heck, it hasn't half given us a boring, apathetic political system...
Thanks for giving me a kick in the pants to start writing again!
Me and my wife honeymooned in New Hampshire last Christmas, and I'm extremely fond of that part of the world and its people. I think you nail it when you mention 'cynicism' - it's precisely the lack of cynicism that makes American discourse about politics so refreshing, on the right & the left. And because we *are* so cynical, that American 'naivety' is very easy to poke fun at. In actual fact, as you say, the joke is on us.
Cheers for reading and commenting anyway, Dazzy. Do you keep a blog or anything?
No blog at the moment, I'm afraid,but I really need to give myself a kick and start one! I think I've been a bit intimidated in the past - there are some awesome, knowledgable writers in the blogosphere, and many of them are incredibly prolific. It's only recently dawned on me that some of my fave blogs (including yours, natch) are written by guys who only post when they've got something worth saying.
I'm not sure if anyone will want to read it, but I think I might finally be getting around to sharing my thoughts on the subjects that matter, which may or may not include Calvin & Hobbes, mid-70's Mad Magazine and The Sex Pistols vs Bill Grundy...
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How about this as a notion. Having had the pleasure of a month's worth of digesting your post, I can now form a comment that has the luxury of thought as opposed to a knee-jerk 'GREAT POST!' like I was originally going to submit.
I'd argue that, in some ways, we *do* have our own version of the tea-party.
On the left, there's the Socialist Workers Party, the right, EDL and BNP.
The latter two seem to be particularly adept at stirring up a passion (if unsavoury) response in their followers. The EDL have been able to host huge rallies and engaged people in politics that have felt left out by the big parties.
Of course, this isn't a defence of their polemic, but you have to admire the way they've managed to reach out to people that reside in places where the sniffy political classes refuse to debate.
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