THE TEA PARTY PHENOMENON

Yesterday was Tax Day, which seemed like the perfect day to protest against high taxation, which is what organizers of the "Tea Parties" did around the country. Glenn Reynolds has a great deal of coverage on his Instapundit site. Although I am not involved in these protests, and haven't been covering them, they are a familiar phenomenon. I saw several of these grass-roots movements during my time as a full-time, conservative radio talk show host. The folks on the Left who insist on believing that these protests are either an "astroturf" movement, created by Republican or Republican sponsored fake grassroots organizations, or populated simply by the tinfoil hat wearing crowd of crazies, are making the same mistake they have made in times past. They fail to sense the popular anger out there over the bailouts, despite the polling data that has consistently shown that anger, and the popular fear about increasing government intrusion in their lives. This fear and anger was muted during the last years of the Clinton administration due to increasing prosperity, and it was muted during the Bush years by the specter of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Today, however, the dynamics are quite different. We face genuine economic hardship, and the Obama administration is deliberately playing down the "War on Terror" (despite the fact that they pretty much continue to fight it along the lines of the previous administration). At the same time the government is intruding into the marketplace in a massive way. This causes people to wonder how we are ever going to get out of debt without massive tax increases down the line. Thus, the "Tea Parties". Leftists who fail to realize the true, populist roots of these protests will find themselves, once again, on the outside looking in, much as they did in early 1995 when the new Republican Congress took charge.