By Star Parker
Monday, June 16, 2014
Just when Tea Party obituaries were being sounded around
the country, Washington fixture of 42 years, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran,
loses to upstart Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel.
And one week later, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in
the blockbuster of this year’s political season, is booted out of office in the
Virginia Republican primary by an economics professor from Randolph-Macon
College, total undergraduate enrollment - 1,312 students.
Turns out that reports of the death of the Tea Party are
greatly exaggerated.
According to the New York Times editorial page, writing
about Cantor’s defeat, the Tea Party is “producing candidates who are
light-years from the mainstream.”
Many continue to harbor and sell the illusion, nurtured
by media sources like the New York Times, and reaching sometimes to even the
Wall Street Journal, that somehow there is a “mainstream” in American politics
today and that anyone with strongly held conviction, who actually cares about
that conviction, is an “extremist” or “ideologue” and not part of this
“mainstream.”
But if mainstream means not clearly on one side of the
political spectrum or the other, a new report from Pew Research shows that what
is supposedly mainstream today is not mainstream at all. The report, “Political
Polarization in the American Republic,” shows that it is now the minority of
Americans who are not clearly on the left or the right.
Only 39 percent of Americans define themselves in the
middle, as a mixed bag of liberal and conservative values. The majority of
Americans, the other 61 percent, see themselves as on the liberal left or the
conservative right. Thirty four percent say they are mostly or consistently
liberal and 27 percent say they are mostly or consistently conservative.
Just ten years ago 49 percent – ten percentage points
more – defined themselves in the mixed middle.
The New York Times would like us to believe that there is
a “mainstream” in America today because what “mainstream” means is status quo –
don’t rock the boat. Because of the massive growth of government over recent
years, today’s status quo means acceptance of a great lurch leftward, which has
already occurred.
It sounds so measured and sober to call a candidate
“mainstream.”
But “mainstream” is not measured and sober.
It means shrugging your shoulders at $17 trillion in
federal debt, $4 trillion in federal spending, and a tax code of over 73,000
pages.
In polling reported by Gallup, for 45 years from 1952 to
1997, over 80 percent of Americans said there is “plenty of opportunity” in the
country. By last year this was down to 52 percent.
The Tea Party is not an ideological movement. It is a
movement of decent, hard-working Americans from quiet communities who are no
longer willing to accept freedom and opportunity disappearing as result of the
massive growth of government and a power-satiated political class in
Washington.
Most of America’s Declaration of Independence consists of
listing of the violations of the personal liberties of the American colonists
by the King of England. The founding of the country was not born of ideology
but of the practical realities of individuals wanting to live free finding it
harder and harder to do so.
This is what is happening today and it will only stop
when either Americans at the grass roots re-achieve freedom and perceive that
the opportunity that comes with it is back, or they stop caring about it.
America has no center today. You either accept a
left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it.
Some are saying that Eric Cantor is a conservative.
But given where we are today, a politician, particularly
one in a position of leadership, is seen as either part of the problem or part
of the solution.
Increasingly, after many years in Washington, and
enjoying the trappings of power, Cantor grew to be perceived as the former.
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