Tea Party Backers

NYT article about T party demographics.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

“The only way they will stop the spending is to have a revolt on their hands,” Elwin Thrasher, a 66-year-old semiretired lawyer in Florida, said in an interview after the poll. “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.”

It is irritating to me that these people talk about revolution as if it were such an easy thing to do. These people sit in their houses with TV and drive around in their SUV's taking so many things completely for granted. They're mostly old people so it's not like they would be able to physically fight much anyway. Plus, they all take a bunch of pills everyday for their heart conditions or diabetes, etc. The whole point of democracy was so that disagreements could be resolved without total social upheaval. Revolution is very traumatizing, and it would take decades to simply rebuild the infrastructure, not to mention restore order, the rule of law, and political stability. Americans idealize revolution because it was founded by revolting against England. I would say that was a relatively clear cut struggle. Americans did not want to be taxed without representation, and ultimately England was driven out of the colonies. Who is the modern day colonizer of America? Obama? The Democrats? Anyway, if Tea Partiers want to get violent, we can have a revolution, but there will be just as many liberals interested in a new order so it will more likely be a civil war. Perhaps one side will be driven away to Alaska.

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

American Denial

This is an interesting article.

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.”