There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.
The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.
In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.
Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.
I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.
L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31
November 1, 2010
QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement
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Rob Ford has demonstrated we have the numbers if we can only provide the alternatives. Every sitting MP has to go.
Comment by Flea — November 1, 2010 @ 17:28
Unfortunately, the Rob Ford phenomenon didn’t seem to have echoes anywhere else in the GTA. Durham regional council returned most of the same faces. A ballot measure to mandate the direct election of the regional chair got 81% of the vote, but won’t be implemented because it didn’t get more than 50% of the registered voters’ approval (I have no idea if more than 50% of the eligible voters have ever voted in a municipal/regional election in Durham, but I suspect not).
Comment by Nicholas — November 2, 2010 @ 09:12