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Sunday, October 23, 2011

The Tea Partiers Have Little in Common With the Occupiers

The Tea Partiers are angry because they think government is giving too much to Black people, the Occupiers of Wall Street and elsewhere are angry because they think government is giving too much to filthy rich people. The first movement is wrong, evil, and stupid, the second movement is factually and actually obviously correct.

Those who propose that there is an interesting and possibly productive overlap between these movements are focusing on superficial similarities (often ineptly mistaking racist dog-whistle statements about "taxes" and "corruption" and "Big Brother" for actual propositional substance) while missing the glaring and irreconcilable difference between these movements.

Just as one is mostly wrong to think of "independents" as anything but disaffected Republicans who think like Republicans (if "thinking" is the word for it) but are now ashamed to say so given GOP antics, one is mostly wrong to think of "Tea Partiers" as anything but yet another stale repackaging of the usual white-racist patriarchal theocratic Base of the Republican Party since Nixon. One understands almost nothing about the Occupiers by reading them through tea-tainted spectacles.

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