The Tea Party is making a mistake if they align with the Republicans.
They are the first thing to come along in a while that looks like the beginnings of an alternative party to the Democrats and Republicans, with a genuinely alternative platform, a genuinely alternative set of priorities.
If they decide to run with the Republicans then they deserve the footnote to history they will become.
I don't know why, as author of a blog called Independent Caucus, why the Democrat and Republican parties are so radical. I am not a sufficient historian to comment as to whether they are more polar, more radical, and further from one another than at other times in history, or even what metric one would use to make the case for or against that claim. I only have my perception, nebulus as it is, and the similar perception expressed by various retired legislators, that things are more polar, more radical, more partisan, than they used to be earlier in my lifetime. It's one thing to have the perception, as Einstein did early on, that something was missing from Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics; and it is something else again, and altogether important to moving beyond something flawed to something better to identify and quantify that missing thing. I wish I had and could share in this post the E=Mc**2 of the radicalism of the American two-party system, a system which used to regularly resemble a Venn Diagram featuring a considerable intersection of opinion, and now, with a strict party-line vote on health care, looks like two completely stand-alone circles.
But overlay the size of those circles on the electorate who strongly agrees with each, and you will see, based on the polls, and how unpopular each party is, that the size of those circles is ever smaller. And what does that tell you? That there is a great, and increasingly great opportunity for the construction of a third party, a third circle, which can cover the broad swath of the American electorate unhappy with both the Democrats and Republicans.
That is the great opportunity of the Tea Parties, to be that, or the vanguard to that, and either way be something revolutionary and historic. But they immediately forfeit that opportunity if they decide to join a party with an overall approval of in the mid to high twenty percent range, and a party which has famously advanced so much of what the Tea Parties oppose, most obviously, the accumulation and carrying of a huge national debt. To join the Republicans is to immediately pour a considerable amount of water into an otherwise very strong cup of tea.
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