From Post Politics:
At last weekend’s Netroots Nation gathering in Minneapolis, liberal activists expressed frustration that they lacked the political power or media focus given to the conservative tea-party movement. Former White House environmental official Van Jones is hoping to change that with a new political effort dubbed “The American Dream Movement.”
Organizers are hoping to emulate the the success of the tea party, which became a significant force in the 2010 midterms…
I know that our liberals like to believe that the TEA Party was created by the Koch brothers and isn’t grass roots, but the facts are otherwise. No one person or group can be said to have started the TEA Party – and no one person or group speaks for it. As someone with a pretty good knowledge of history, I have never seen anything quite like it. Mass movements we’ve had a-plenty, but none arising so spontaneously from the people and so entirely resistant to central control. The leadership of the GOP and conservatism is still struggling to keep up…and to keep up not in line with taking over, but only of remaining at the forefront of organic, American political development.
Van Jones doesn’t understand this – he looks around and wonders why there isn’t a liberal TEA Party and so sets out to create one. But it can’t be done…you can’t create a spontaneous movement. For there to be a liberal TEA Party there would have to arise among liberal-minded people first a willingness to act without orders (liberals are the most unthinking and regimented people imaginable, when you get down to it…only a very few ever dare stray from the party line); secondly, there would have to be a conviction that liberalism, as such, is both vital and under existential threat. After Wisconsin a lot of liberals are still feeling the threat, but it is hard to consider liberalism vital in the sense of something to die for. The TEA Party feels that if it doesn’t win then the men who fought at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg and Normandy will have died in vain…liberalism works out to a whine about how life isn’t fair.
Van Jones is free to try his effort, but he won’t be able to do anything other than duplicate what liberalism already has – ponderous groups of liberal special interests who, in the end, are just bitching and moaning about the taxpayer not paying them more money. Meanwhile, the TEA Party will move on from victory to victory because it isn’t fighting for the special benefit of TEA Party activists, but for the whole of the United States of America.
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