Digby — Tea Party’s great dunce-off: How Ted Cruz is quietly kicking Rand Paul’s butt

The real Tea Party.

At the time the Tea Party allegedly sprang up out of nowhere the country was still reeling from the war in Iraq and a financial crisis that shook the economy to its core, so it naturally marketed itself around economic issues. Therefore, the Tea Party was assumed to be populated by people who cared little about social issues and defense and instead signaled the beginning of a new, highly motivated libertarian faction in the GOP. But polling showed the Tea Party largely overlapped with the Christian Right and the traditional Republican hawks. In fact, they are the same people.

And it must be noted that the right wing of American politics is inherently reactionary and always animated by certain impulses, however they might be identified at a particular time. As sociologist Theda Skocpol, author (with Vanessa Williamson) of the book “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” described them:

They are overwhelmingly older, white, conservative-minded men and women who fear that “their country” is about to be lost to mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs (like the Affordable Care Act) for low- and moderate-income working-aged people, many of whom are black or brown. Fiscal conservatism is often said to be the top grassroots Tea Party priority, but Williamson and I did not find this to be true.

Salon
Tea Party’s great dunce-off: How Ted Cruz is quietly kicking Rand Paul’s butt
Digby