Huffington Post’s Sam Stein is one of my favorite writers. An otherwise excellent article about Nevada’s tea party-republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle is spoiled by the first sentence:
“The Tea Party movement is better-known for its alignment with libertarian, anti-Washington sentiment than for its ties to social conservatism.”
I don’t know how that is possible unless you haven’t been outside the Beltway in a while. Maybe HuffPo should rotate reporters? I have chronicled the tea party in my blog and video reporting; it has never failed to put piety front and center: the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the Tea Party Nation bus tour, the April 15th tax day tea party of 2010, the Parker Griffith town hall last August… Sharron Angle is an example of right-wing psychological projection while Glenn Beck understands his audience perfectly. What about the tea party isn’t a faith-based platform?
In fact, this is the divide I’ve identified many times before: fundamentalist Randians and fundamentalist charismatics actually don’t like sharing a movement in common. The TPC in Nashville was actually protested by libertarians, who don’t like Sarah Palin. The sanguine Alaskan is an ever-popular figure because she is a true-believing product of charismatic Christian identity politics; her 2008 campaign appearances brought out the worst elements of what became the tea party “phenomenon.”
The tea party is a mass exercise in cognitive dissonance; its disorganization masks some very brittle fractures.
