“Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota,” Santorum crowed, at a rally in St. Charles, Mo. “Tonight was a victory for the voices of our party, conservatives and Tea Party people.”

The Daily Beast raised some hopes and hackles the other day by declaring tea parties a “dead” movement. But writer Patricia Murphy doesn’t seem to understand that tea parties were never anything but a new brand name for the same old conservative movement. She quoted the high-flying pyramid schemer behind the local tea party organization where I live:

This should be a cautionary tale for Occupy and the left: purity is not the ticket to victory, and “holding their feet to the fire” is only effective when it leaves room for all-American compromise. Tea parties have engendered a backlash in public opinion by pushing their elected representatives into national fiscal disaster, among other things.

As I keep saying, the basic problem of modern conservatism is that it cannot answer any challenge of the 21st Century. A bit more than half the GOP would like to stop bleating about gays and abortion, while a narrow minority cannot shut up about gays and abortion. The entire party is in deep capture to this Christian conservative element — and it shows no sign of changing its mind, ever.

Faith-based politics don’t need facts or logic because they have holy writ. By refusing to share the same reality with the rest of us, conservatism preserves itself from all pressure to adapt: “ignorance is strength,” as Orwell put it. Thus the very thing that makes today’s “tea party”-style conservatism unable to answer the challenges of the day is also what keeps it going. So don’t count the religious right out just yet — in fact, assume they will be around for a long time. Culture warriors come for the party, but stay for the jihad.

Commentator Juan Williams was serving two masters: FOX Noise, which has no standards, and NPR, which has high standards. He couldn’t serve both masters to the full satisfaction of either. Now that he no longer appears on the public airwaves, he’s suffering a change of mind:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

The code also extends to attacks on legal immigrants, always carefully lumped in with illegal immigrants, as people seeking “amnesty” and taking jobs from Americans.

Importantly, Williams makes note of the fact that immigrant-bashing does not stop with the undocumented — and that Republican rhetoric about immigrants is an extension of the dog whistling directed towards citizen minorities. The politics of resentment are quite popular with the tea party crowd, which sees the world as a zero-sum win/lose game in which a job for a brown or black person is a loss for white, Christian, “real” Americans. There is no rising tide to lift all boats in their universe. Instead, life is a competition between races — one that white people must win in order to remain on top.

Williams has identified the language of fascism, but he still doesn’t understand that the crowd cheering Newt Gingrich’s response to his questions is actually driving the rhetorical spiral, and not the other way around. They had their way in 2010 and will seek to have it again in 2012. The rest of us had better wake up before they do.

Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

That’s not the liberal message — at all. It’s the right wing caricature of the liberal message. In beating this straw-man, West represents something extremely ugly and authoritarian here: think like me or get out is hardly “patriotic,” it’s actual, real, not-imaginary fascism. The tea party crowd that roared in approval for these remarks stands as Exhibit A for the brand of ugliness I’m talking about, and I will sooner die than let them win.

Watch, listen and learn:-

This woman will vote, peeps. She will vote for the Republican Party. She’s a Teabagger, but, you know, if Mitt Romney – the man whom noted political pundit, Bill Maher, thinks could so totally beat Obama – garnered the GOP nomination, she’d hold her nose and vote for the sucker, because her news source, Fox, and her corporately Koch-backed branch of the Tea Party would tell her that Romney might not be their cup of tea (pun intended), but he was on their side, and a vote for him would ensure a defeat for Obama.

This woman reads (books by Beck and Coulter), she listens to Rush Limbaugh and she watches news on Fox.

Listen to what she’s saying. It’s cack and disgusting lies, but she, like many others of her ilk, believe it. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true … just to get the illegal and illegitimate pretender (read: black man) out of the White House, she’s willing to vote against her interests.

She’s 71 years old, and she thinks the Democrats want to spit on people of her age and consign them to death panels. The sad thing will be that when Paul Ryan, a Republican, does just that, in her mind, it will always be Obama’s fault.

But she’ll be there, a year from tomorrow, at the voting booth, and if the people who still swear by the words of Professional Left hypocrites like Michael Moore and Bill Maher, who are pushing the “Don’t Vote” dynamic. If people at the Occupy protests listen to their self-appointed voices tripping on their own egos, like Joe Diaz, then this woman and everything she represents – the ueber Rightwing Republican Party – will have won also.

It’s more than an Election. It’s more than class warfare.

It’s culture war.

Remember the guns at tea parties? Remember all variety of treasonous birther nonsense? Ancient history, I know, but I’ve been trying and failing to remember a time when tea parties had to watch out for bomb-throwing leftie anarchists. You know, like Sunday morning’s bomb attack on an Occupation camp in Maine:

Portland police Sgt. Glen McGary said the bomb was thrown into the camp’s kitchen, a tarped area where food is cooked and served. Protest organizers said the explosion lifted a large table about a foot off the ground.

“There was no fire . . . We had a good 20 feet of thick smoke rolling out from under the table,” Wilburn said. They could see the “G” on the 24-ounce bottle and its orange cap, as well as bits of silver metal, she said.

Wingnut rationalizations include nobody was killed, the bomb was not that powerful, etc. But they can’t say ‘both sides do it’ because that isn’t true; in fact, this incident underscores a long-running theme at  the Ink: they are the fear they want us to feel, and this is their incipient fascism coming out. People who draw Hitler mustaches on Obama are unintentionally telling you about their own minds.

The claim that 90% of terrorist attacks in the United States are committed by “left wing extremists” is an example of the intense, fully-formed world of rationalization they inhabit (Plato described it as a cave, but the common phrase these days is “epistemic closure.”) This is not politics; it is war, and the moment you call them out on it the tea party proves the point. I hope for more meetings like this one, because they prove that everything I have ever said about tea parties is spot-on.

Tea parties hate planning. The very word is anathema. I first twigged to this in 1990, when I encountered a right-wing nutjob outside the Maryville, TN city hall with a sign that called zoning ordinances “COMMUNIST RULE!!!” As I keep telling readers, there’s nothing “new” about tea parties; they’re just the same old wacky warmed-over. The toon comes from VABike, which also links to this Roanoke.com piece on tea party conspiracy nuts going crazy over a local sustainability effort:

The initiative’s objective is a locally written regional plan to help communities develop in smart ways that connect them to resources, stimulate economic activity and protect what they want to preserve. It is a purely voluntary endeavor that could be a boon for the mostly rural valley at a time when rural America is mostly emptying out.

[...]

Public engagement is usually the lifeblood of healthy community life, but only if it has at least a loose connection to reason. One speaker’s appalling comparison of the initiative to the removal of European Jews from their homes during the Holocaust bore no relation to rational thought.

Remember, cars are the only form of transportation that isn’t socialism. Except for the highways, streets, and free parking spaces, that is.

A small political gathering of about 18 liberal thinkers at River Forks Park Sunday afternoon erupted in conflict when about 35 members of the conservative tea party intruded upon the meeting, waving flags and holding signs accusing the rival group of being communists, Marxists and socialists.

The liberal group — organized by MoveOn.org — decided to leave the park and move its potluck to a nearby home. Members of the conservative group followed, parking at the entrance of a private lane leading to the home to continue their protest.

And it gets even better:

Conservative organizers defended their actions and said they will continue to protest similar gatherings.

“We were there to find out what they had to say and to bring a notice to the public that this kind of thing was going on. Quite honestly, if they have it again, then we are really going to make it well known,” Raynor said.

Raynor said the group believes MoveOn.org is a communist front and said he would not stand for America becoming a fascist nation.

Fascism…that would be like the Brownshirts, right? They “were founded to protect Nazi meetings from disruption and to break up the meetings of other parties” — according to Conservapedia, to which I shan’t link. Raynor confuses fascism and communism in a very familiar way (ahem, Glenn Beck, ahem). They are not the same thing except in the fevered, miseducated ravings of right wing authoritarians (read: fascists). But that is not why I bring this story up. Item the second, from two weeks ago:

Organizers of the Freedom Jamboree announced Wednesday that they have canceled the tea party convention planned for this fall, citing low registration.

They had hoped the event would serve as a stage for Republican presidential candidates to court the conservative movement, and two — Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) — had already confirmed they would attend.

The weekend of reflection and strategizing was scheduled for Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in Kansas City, Kan., and included a straw poll. Twenty-one local tea party groups started it with the intent to reclaim the movement from national umbrella groups and offer an alternative to the annual fall tea party rally on the National Mall. (Emphasis mine)

The tea parties are mostly a spent force at this point. Rallies are fewer and further between, more sparsely attended, and less enthusiastic. Partly, this is because the main object of tea party astroturfing — the return of the GOP to power in Washington one last time before demographic changes annihilate its influence — has been achieved. The new has worn off, and independents are fleeing in droves as more and more Americans see through the pretense of a freedom movement in the wake of events in Wisconsin. Members of the already-fractured movement are resisting the national organizations, all of which are declining.

But that doesn’t mean tea parties are going away. Indeed, as they become more marginal and less relevant, they will become more desperate, daring, and dangerous. It’s already happening.

Former (and current) Neo Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Confederates, and other representatives of the many wings of the “white nationalist” movement are starting to file paperwork and print campaign literature for offices large and small, pointing to rising unemployment, four years with an African-American president, and rampant illegal immigration as part of a growing mound of evidence that white people need to take a stand.

Oh, and remember Tea Party Nation? They held a convention in Nashville with Sarah Palin, and now they’re bemoaning the threat of “non-European immigration.” Of all the major tea party orgs, TPN is the furthest advanced toward becoming a hate group. I’m sure they’ll meet Duke in the middle somewhere and call it bipartisan.

Via Left in Alabama