Tea Party Will Never Be In Power: Their Bond Is Fighting Against Power

Related Article: Tea Party Purification

America loves an underdog. Once the underdog wins authority, however, we no longer cheer for him.

The Tea Party’s purpose is to cheer and shout from the sidelines, so it loves a fighting dog… but it’s still an underdog. It has to be.

One binding sense of purpose within the Tea Party is to fight against those in power (another manifestation of the never-ending conservative purification effort). This has uncovered yet another problem for the Tea Party insofar as its factions being an alliance to get anything done. The “Teangry” are wonderfully talented at making noise – but that’s all they do. Noise can make politicians nervous and vote out a congressman or two – but noise doesn’t govern and noise doesn’t achieve – it’s just… noise. The immobility of Congress is not “done” by the Tea Party, it’s merely a side effect the noise.

Tea Party Cannot Ever Be in Power or Leadership

Eric Cantor lost his seat in Congress in large part because of that republican bond among the non-elite within the party: don’t trust people in power. If a person has political power, not even conservative republicans is safe from the Wrath of Tea Party. In many ways The Tea Party are little more than angry teenagers: anyone with authority is hated, mocked, poked, and never to be trusted – everyone else “just doesn’t understand!” Don’t trust Obama, don’t trust Cantor, Don’t trust Boehner or McConnell – that’s the whole point of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party was initially conceived by people who hate taxes, but it grew into a pack of angry underdogs who can’t organize anything more than waving guns and flags at anyone who’s not like them. The Tea Party isn’t strong. It’s a yapping dog behind a safety fence. The politicians who cater to them just want to avoid the yapping because it gives them a headache.

If the Tea Party were to actually have its members in leadership positions in Congress – like was the case with Eric Cantor – then that person is no longer part of the Tea Party. To be truly “Teangry” requires a feeling of being oppressed by those in power, therefore, to be in power forfeits one’s status as being a part of the Tea Party.

Too bad for Cantor. This personality trait of the Tea Party and extreme right wing also is precarious for their cause. They’ve managed to rile themselves up to such a raging fervor against anyone and everyone in leadership that they themselves can never be in leadership – they would explode from all the self-hate. The Tea Party as a group will never have enough members in power to actually move Tea Party ideology policy. They can’t. To have power is to not be Tea Party. They’ll always bark from the sidelines in subcommittees and in red states, but true leadership… Tea Party leadership is impossible – you might as well as them to become socialists.

It’s not a surprise, really, when you look at the arc of the Tea Party story, particularly that it is so fractured at this point so all they can do is throw colorful rallies. There’s no official Tea Party platform. There’s no leader, only cheerleaders. You can’t win a football game when all you have are cheerleaders… you need players.

Its purpose is to agitate (without the educate and organize). It’s a club with anger as the membership card. The Tea Party purpose is not to govern, and never to rule. The electoral purpose of the Tea Party was to rally the disenfranchised white voters in order  to get out the vote against Obama and democrats. Deep down where shady men travel, that was its only purpose. Now the purpose is stuck in the mud: the grass roots anger is too old to be genuinely sustained, and by design it can never be in a legitimate position of power.

Culturally, the Tea Party’s purpose is to agitate. That’s how it will be remembered. Since the Tea Party is basically made from the angry republicans within the GOP all it can ever do is agitate, hold bizzarre meetings and panels about conspiracy theories, and make the rest of the country uncomfortable when they walk by with their long guns on display because it makes them feel stronger than they really are. It’s incapable of being in power because being in power is against everything the Tea Party stands for.

In deeply red Congressional districts, they’ll still get a Tea Partier elected to office every now and again, but that will be the extent of the “movement” – because as we’ve seen they vote out their own people who are in legitimate positions of authority. Forever underdogs… forever yapping from behind the fence.