The Tea Party Movement has drawn a lot of attention in the past year and a half, since its inception in the spring of 2009, shortly after Barack Obama became President of the United States!
Political observers have tried to figure out the “nuts and bolts” of this movement, which is clearly seen now as an attempt at nostalgia, to bring back the past, and reject much of what has happened in the past 80 years of American history!
The Tea Party Movement worships the Second and Tenth Amendments, and despises the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments! They promote gun rights and states rights, and hate the income tax and direct election of US Senators!
The Tea Party Movement rejects the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including Social Security, minimum wages, labor unions, deficit spending, government bureaucracy and growth in Presidential authority!
The Tea Party Movement repudiates the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, including Medicare, Medicaid, immigration reform, Affirmative Action and civil rights enforcement, and further growth in government bureaucracy, and even more Presidential authority!
The Tea Party Movement resents big national government and the rapid changes in the makeup of the American people, brought about by immigration, and the growing birth rate among minority groups, which is moving America toward a nation which will be majority minority by the middle of the 21st century!
In many ways, the Tea Party Movement wants back the 1950s, the so called “Good Old Days”, when society seemed more stable, and we were unchallenged as a world power, and white Christians were the dominant group in America, as they had always been, but no longer will be in the next two generations!
The problem is that nostalgia is nostalgia! It is not the future of America, and the Tea Party Movement offers no prospect of facing the future, as it is mired in a “romantic past” which cannot be revived, and was never as ideal as they perceive!