That's Threat with a Tea

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
--The Who

Months back we posited that, if the Tea Party movement got legs, then it would increasingly be viewed as a threat by both the Left and Right. This appears to be playing out.

As victories in primary elections by TP centric candidates pile up, not only has the Left escalated its propaganda campaign against the movement, but the Right has been distancing itself from some candidates, and is now publicly fretting about party in-fighting and dilution of voting power.

Both sides (correctly) sense poor fit between Tea Party philosophy and political machine custom. The Tea Party's core values of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government align with neither the Left or Right. TP tenets challenge the existence of the political Establishment.

To the Establishment, TP candidates appear awkward and unorthodox, which often leaves them open to ridicule by elitists. Most have not been trained as professional politicians. Many hail from Main Street backgrounds. They appear driven more by reluctant "if I don't do something, then we may not make it" motives rather than by political ambition.

As we observed months back, the Tea Party movement is a social movement. It surely has political consequences, but the basis for the TP movement is social power rather than political power. Social power is the network of voluntary interactions that produce relative abundance from nature's condition of relative scarcity. People freely engaging in exchange to improve their standards of living.

Political power, on the other hand, seeks to acquire wealth via non-economic means. The mechanism for political power is the State, which is constantly seeking to repress social power--cripple it, tax it, loot it, etc. Rather than free and voluntary exchange, political power enlists the State's as its agent to appropriate resources by coercive force.

The Tea Party movement seeks to dismantle the State, which threatens all who amass wealth by political means. It should be no wonder, then, why this movement is opposed by all of those who benefit from operations of the Establishment.