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Ask HN: Election Day tomorrow, what do geeks think of the Tea Party?

11 points by eduardo_f ↗ HN
I'm from Spain but I've been living in the US for the last two years (starting up here after Master's degree). I can't vote and I don't follow politics very closely but I like to keep abreast of recent developments. I just read this on the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304173704575578200086257706.html

I find mass-media quite polarized regarding the Tea Party, so I'm interested in the opinion of people here who I usually agree with on many other topics (tech, startups, etc).

16 comments

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kls
It's all over the board over here. I fear we are Balkanizing. We just cant get down to the common sense issues like economy, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We get wrapped up in the telling other people what to do issues. The tea party wants to get all of the old guard out which is a noble goal but the special interest groups are already trying to infiltrate it's ranks. Until lobbyist and money men are barred from access to politicians you can be assured that nothing will changes in American politics. Unfortunately the only ones that can bar that access are the politicians themselves, so don't expect that to change until we have a revolution or Balkanize and when I say revolution I mean the kind with guns and guerrillas. That won't happen until people are starving so I don't see much changing in the US for a while. Anyway, I think the Tea Party started off with all good intentions and then they became a political machine.
zbruhnke
unfortunately I completely agree with you here ... allowing Sarah Palin to become the face of the tea party (at least in my opinion) was the beginning of the end of it being a noble movement. They have turned into a group of strictly far right wing activists and lobbyists who care more about political agenda's than the state of our union.

We need serious term limit and campaign donation reform to be able to bring this country back to any visions of grandeur and unfortuantely without someone with Bill Gates or Warren Buffet money running the type of people who can bring that type of change would never be elected.

Our country is stuck in a two party system in which a third party is either absorbed by one of the political machines or left to rot all on its own.

eof
I wrote this on the tea party about a year and a half ago: http://www.geoffgolder.com/node/16

My core values are inline with the Tea Party, however, it has evolved into something it originally was not, and something I don't really respect.

It's outside of the scope of this post, but if you really want to understand the tea party situation, you really need to understand the difference between a religious-conservative and an intellectual-conservative.

Most liberals won't sense the difference and thus disregard (arguably more logical) libertarians as they can't distinguish them from the vast majority of religious-conservatives. This happens at a very large scale.

oomkiller
Pack of fools regurgitating views they get from the media, without any actual solutions.
curt
I have big hopes for the tea party, as a libertarian when government "helps" it hurts. You look back through history, most bubbles/recessions were caused by horrible government policies. The unions, big business, big finance, and government all use law and regulations to gain and maintain power. For example I had to shut down my last business when the industry leader hired a bunch of lobbyists to write legislation that caused my costs to increase so much I couldn't stay in business.

What I'm hoping for is an even playing field where everyone plays by the same rules. If you're wealthy you hire a lobbyist to get you a tax loophole or waiver. There's a big difference between a small business owner making $500k a year and Google. The small business owner pays a 35% tax rate while Google can hire an army of lawyers to game the system for a 3% tax rate. Why not get rid of all the deductions and have flat 10% tax rate. The government would raise the same amount while increasing the economy's growth rate and helping business save millions they currently waste on lawyers and accountants.

One set of simple rules for everyone. That's my hope.

cmelbye
You can't seriously hope that reform like that will happen under the current state of the tea party. It's turned from a grassroots libertarian movement to Palin's branch of the Republican Party.
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Towle_
A short history of the Tea Party:

It was started as a libertarian-minded movement with a Ron Paul flavor to it. Initially, the right- and left-wing mainstream media were unsure of how to cover the Tea Party. Their ideology of libertarianism was foreign to the two-party landscape, and the movement had no visible leader.

Eventually, the Tea Party gained enough momentum that non-libertarian politicians (most notably Sarah Palin) saw it as politically useful and started speaking at rallies. These politicians were not libertarians, however; most were neo-conservatives. They echoed some of the familiar Tea Party rhetoric, only what was politically palatable and made sense to the two-party world. The rest of the libertarian ideology was thrown in the trash.

Because of her familiarity to the public, both sides of the media identified Palin as the de-facto leader of the Tea Party. Her ideology replaced the movement's. The complex story of a decentralized, leaderless, libertarian-inspired grassroots uprising was replaced by the simple story of Palin leading a bunch of people who hate Obama.

Of course, you are what the media says you are. The rallies themselves began to draw more and more Palin crazies, after they were told it was her movement. Those are the people you see on CNN holding up the often-racist, always-illogical signage.

And that's how the Tea Party went from enlightened to bigoted.

curt
Any movement is going to have its share of crazies, but as a whole tea party folks are great people. A lot of those "racists" are plants, I've gone to a few events and those people are quickly booed out.

Just go to an event and talk to the people yourself.

Towle_
Whether or not they're plants, they are certainly not representative of the movement as a whole, neither its former nor current self. The bigots are the people "we" associate with the Tea Party because CNN focuses on them. And CNN focuses on them because they, like everyone else in the media, are in the business of re-confirming the worldview of their audience.

Who is a loyal CNN viewer? According to CNN, he is educated and informed and secular and (implicitly) liberal. Also according to CNN, Sarah Palin is none of those things. So, it becomes part of the loyal CNN viewer's worldview to dislike her.

How can CNN re-confirm this worldview in their coverage of Tea Party rallies? Easy. Since the loyal CNN viewer knows he is educated and secular (after all, CNN told him so) then he knows he's against racists, who are neither. So CNN turns the Tea Party into a bunch of racists and makes Sarah Palin their leader. Worldview re-confirmed. "See! What did I tell you about that Sarah Palin lady..."

(Note that I am not making any judgments one way or the other about the Tea Partiers or Palin herself. I am just explaining how this works.)

philwelch
The actual libertarians I know tend to think of the Tea Party as kind of a retarded little brother to the libertarian movement. That's probably not the most tasteful analogy.
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Isamu
The Tea Party is interesting as a grass-roots movement. They started off fairly ignored, then they were noticed and ridiculed, and finally regarded with alarm. They are now in the phase of being co-opted by personalities.

But there isn't much clear policy that binds them together.

I find the fear-mongering towards them to be silly. This is the face of democracy, and it is rather telling to see who finds this threatening.

tdfx
The co-opting of the Tea Party movement by the "personalities" is what I personally find threatening. I identify myself ideologically as libertarian of the progressive flavor (which, from what I've read, is what the Tea Party originally claimed to be), but I still would not go within 50 miles of a rally being sponsored by Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin.
philwelch
A large group of very angry, not especially thoughtful people influenced by demagogues and rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

As a political cynic who doesn't invest much thought in political issues, I consider them the same as any other populist movement: until they start rioting or shooting people, they're not really interesting enough to look up from my code to take notice of.