Our Tea Party Comes Late: A Belated Response to the Responders

A little over a year ago, many sectors of the far right here in the United States did what the Left generally fails to do, to coalesce. They coalesced around a movement, Tea Party or Teabagging depending on who you are, that came together against a common enemy, common hysteria, and with common slogans. As time went on, it became clearer that this grassroots was nothing but astroturf, that there was corporate backing and power structure support fundamental to this movement that had never existed for most moments of the truly grassroots Left. It was propped up by climate change lobbyist Koch Industries, the bourgeois mainstream media's FOX News, Congressional Republicans, and took as icons major politicians.

But despite this, the Tea Party was still galvanizing many citizens across the country, and bringing together rightist elements that had been at odds during the Bush administration. Christian extremists, the neo-conservatives of groups like the Protest Warriors, and the anti-immigrant racists Minutemen were not to be found in a room together, all the less for any length of time. But in President Obama, they found an antithesis, a liberal who they exaggerated as a Communist or Socialist, a Black man who frightened their sense of white nationality, a man rolling back Christian extremist and neo-conservative policies, and a worldly, half-first generation man who might understand the plight of immigrant workers. Obama, who has kept troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, cow-towed to Israel and Hamid Karzai, assassinated people in other countries, and worked hard to maintain capitalism.

The analogy is clear: Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried out (much vaster) sweeping changes that introduced tempered levels of social democracy in defense of capitalism from the growing communist and syndicalist movements during the Great Depression, and who likewise carried out assassinations in Central America and ordered the national guard on striking workers, was attacked by elements of the right. The conflict then was in part over the means to protect private property from social war. The conflict today is as much that as racism.

Perhaps the big tent of the Tea Party will someday soon collapse of its own weight into our beloved factionalism, or the Republicans will gain power and this will signal the death knell for the unity of the reactionaries. But this is not the purview of the CP(F). We deign to critique the poor fellows of the right, as our concentration is on the Left. Preferably the socialist left, but today we will include our scurrilous opponents known as Liberals (fore make no mistake about it, a Progressive is nothing but a Liberal in Left clothing).

The Response

The Left and the Liberals saw the rising, militant, and street marching Tea Party with impotent inertia. Antifas know that fascists must be stomped out as soon as they bud to prevent their growth, but both Leftists and Liberals ignored the reactionary clamor until it blossomed into a great bed of weeds. Only in the first few months of this year did much of them capitulate to the Tea Party themes and attempt a retort.

Take, for example, the abysmally unpleasant Coffee Party. Initially, liberals in the bourgeois news media attempted to give it undue publicity, bypassing the long existing left and Bush Era-created liberal movements who had already, if meekly, attempted to shout down Teabaggers. This credit was warrantless. The Coffee Party has proven itself not to be news at all. But let's get to it's most startling of contradictions. The Coffee Party refused to align itself with liberalism, declaring itself sans labels. Oh, how post-politics. So, while the Teabaggers loudly and constantly hoist the banner of conservativism, the Coffeefilters have let the Teabaggers turn its opposite, liberalism, into a dirty word. In other words, the Coffee Party began its counter assault by waving a genuine white flag. This all, at the meantime, while it named itself the Coffee Party, substituting the word Tea with its main beverage competitor. The Coffeefilters, lacking substance, passion, testicles, or ovaries, had C-Span cover their early events only to reveal a continued impotence and lack of direction that led potential followers into confusion. Revolting.

With their time past (or so we hope), various other liberal and Leftist responses have continued to spring up, like blighted tomatoes whose existence will come to naught. A project of the International Association of Machinists, one of many unions whose memberships have declined with North American deindustrialization and automation, calls itself the Union of the Unemployed. Okay, this is a long needed and very basic concept that socialists and unionists have long since known was the right way to go, from those organized by communists in the 1930s to those in Iraq today. Unfortunately, IAM's unemployed union operates as a social networking site rather than anything resembling a union. And true to the game, their project was created by some lame business professionals to appear as sterile and corporate as possible, under the concept UCube (not to be mixed up with Youtube, or is it?). Ergo, they may as well have just created a facebook group.

And where are we today: The Coffee Party - The Cocktail Party - The Molotov Cocktail Party - The Juice Party - The Unemployed Union - The Real Boston Tea Party

Feel free to send us any more of these embarrassments that we might have missed. And pick us up some scones on your way home from work. We have a Tea Party to attend.