What do people in our neighbor to the south think of the fledgling U.S. Tea Party movement? Is it just a collection of well-meaning Americans defending the country, or a loud fringe group creating and feeding on fear? According to columnist Angel Luis Lara of Mexico’s La Jornada, it is decidedly the latter.
For La Jornada, Angel Luis Lara writes in part:
Disenchanted with the political class and the parties, partisans of the Tea Party find their frame of reference elsewhere: Glenn Beck, an ultraconservative TV commentator, is the central spiritual guide of the movement. “He removed my blindfold and made me see that they’re taking away my country,” explains a small fortyish businessman holding a sign that reads: “Thanks, Beck.”
As in a futuristic novel by J.G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick, politicians have been replaced with a TV preacher. Many point out that the most important germ for the Tea Party was the 9/12 Project, a Beck initiative that has sown the country with self-organized citizen groups that seek to “recover the values that America embraced the day after 9/11, when patriotic flag waving and religious unity enveloped the nation.”
“Our way of life is under attack. Draw a line in sand others will understand and our values remain intact. Let’s Take Back Our Country.” This song springs from the lips of a White guy in his seventies accompanying himself with an acoustic guitar, and sporting an old button on his lapel, “Reagan for President.” This isn’t Bela Lugosi in a scene from White Zombie, but a Tea Party activist.
To a great extent, this reactionary movement is the result of two intersecting panics: one ethnic, the other of class. In contrast to the United States as such, almost all of the inhabitants of the Tea Party nation are White. … Their mobilization is a result of the panic they feel over the unstoppable growth of the immigrant population over recent decades and the current birth rates in the country: more children are being born Black, Latino or Asian than White.
Like in a horror movie, the new right in the U.S. finds its driving force in fear.
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