Will Bunch is exactly right about this:
One of the biggest myths about the Tea Party is that a driving force in its creation was anger over bank and Wall Street bailouts. It’s true that some rank-and-file joiners did feel that way at first, but they were quickly
co-opted by the movement leaders — including radio talkers and groups funded by the Koch Brothers — into worshipping the rich instead.
The tea partiers really do hate TARP, and they hate the auto bailout, and they hate the Fed and its money debasing ways. But the tea party’s leaders have always been careful to give those things plenty of lip service while channeling all the movement’s real energy into the issues that its big-dollar funders have always cared about most: lowering taxes on the wealthy, reducing regulations on corporations, and cutting spending on the poor.
After all, tea partiers could have poured their energy into protesting the AIG bailout. They could have poured their energy into insisting that Dodd-Frank be tightened up. They could have poured their energy into demands that the Fed be reformed and made more transparent.
But those were never more than side issues. The real issues for the tea partiers have always been healthcare reform, tax cuts, deficit fever, and EPA bashing. And in the most obvious tell of all, they were actively opposed to Dodd-Frank, a bizarre stand for an allegedly anti-bailout movement. The tea party, in the end, simply isn’t anything new. It’s the same old right-wing fluorescence we see every couple of decades or so, with all the same hobbyhorses. The media really should have figured that out by now.
