The Tea Party and the GOP: Heading for Divorce
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, William A. Galston makes some points that reinforce the still expanding racial fault lines in America (“The Tea Party and the GOP Crackup“) noted in my previous post. The take home message is that there is a rift between (White) Tea Party Republican base representing traditional American conservative rural and small town values versus corporate America and the emerging non-White majority. As always the rhetoric does not explicitly mention race, but it’s looming in the background like the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla. Tea Party Republicans are in the Jacksonian tradition of American politics.
Jacksonians care … passionately about the Second Amendment …. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts ….
These Republicans believe that their country has been taken away from them. They are
aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values.
That’s the crux of the problem in a nutshell. The new hostile elite that has been ascendant since the 1960s has solidified its power by importing a new people—people who want big government, high levels of government services, more immigrants that look like themselves, and who care nothing for the traditional people and culture of America.
Galston points out that most Tea Partiers think that minorities get too much attention from government; 65% view immigrants as a burden on the country. Contrary to elite opinion, they are better educated than the general population and are more likely to be middle class (50%) or upper-middle-class (15%). They are socially conservative on issues like gay marriage. Many are small businessmen who abhor high taxes and government regulation. They have strong economic reasons to oppose the current trend.
Galston concludes:
It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.
The problem is that corporate America is part of the hostile elite—with a globalist outlook, favoring policies that gut the US labor market and highly susceptible to lawsuits by activists and race hustlers if they deviate in the least from the path of righteousness as defined by the diversitycrats. They are not going to switch sides. Indeed, corporate America is a major employer of diversitycrats.
And so much of the really big corporate-derived money in the Republican party comes from ethnically motivated members of the hostile elite, like the Republican Jewish Coalition (which supports gay marriage and the immigration surge) and Sheldon Adelson in particular. According to ProPublica, Adelson donated at least $98 million and perhaps as much as $150 million to Republican candidates and causes in the last election cycle, mainly motivated by his obsession with Israel. This is the highest total for any individual in American history. But Adelson is no fan of anything remotely resembling Tea Party attitudes. VDARE’s Patrick Cleburne notes that Adelson describes himself as a “social liberal” in favor of “socialized-type” health care. Definitely not a Tea Partier.
So we have one part of the Republican Party that is furious that their country is being taken away from them, while the other part—the one with most of the money—is actively involved in their dispossession.
This is not a marriage made in heaven. Again, the Tea Party Republicans are “aroused, angry and above all fearful.” In fact, it looks to me like fertile ground for an implicitly White third party. Republican votes, if not Republican money, come from its Tea Party base. A third party with such a Tea Party platform may not win given that the hostile elite has imported a new electorate opposed to everything the Tea Party holds dear. But when it’s obvious that they can’t win, that’s what revolutions and secessions are made of.
