Tea partiers are like the new, new, new Dick Nixon: Not even a stake in the heart will do it

The Republican Party's purification machine continues to hum. Politico:

Congress hasn’t even been in session a month and a raft of Republicans are already being threatened with primaries in 2016. The reasons run the gamut, from backing John Boehner for speaker to objecting to an anti-abortion bill….

Many of the primary campaigns are almost certain to fizzle once the reality of what it takes to dethrone a sitting lawmaker sets in. Regardless, it’s a rude awakening for a Republican establishment that hoped it had put insurgent challenges to rest.

If the Republican establishment really had that hope, it's more incompetent than we thought.

For all their faults, tea party activists are among the sublimest believers in participatory democracy: they haunt their pols with incessant demands, they're unafraid of (or oblivious to) official power, and above all, they vote. They may have unsophisticated, even demented ideas about the organic roles of compromise and pluralism in politics, but unbalanced ignorance en masse — though amusingly pathetic at times — is still a force to be reckoned with.

Ignorance possesses determination, while sophistication often gives up. This, the Republican establishment didn't know? Who's amusingly pathetic now?

 

Comments

[Peter G]

Didn't know? They relied on it in the sure and certain knowledge that, like evangelicals, they could buy them off with a few sops or control them by co-opting them into the system. Oops.