Tea Party at the Country Club

I recently wrote a bit on this blog about conservative Pavlovian responses.  It’s about time I pointed out at this is not something liberals are immune to.  The phrase that gets the biggest Pavlovian response is “Tea Party”.  The Tea Party is a group of really conservative conservatives that liberals love to hate.  With good reason, I should mention, since it was largely self-identified Tea Partiers that kept the government shutdown going for as long as it did.  The problem is that some liberals will talk about the Tea Party in terms of stereotypes about “crazy” people, “rednecks”, “trailer trash”, imagine them to be stupid, poor, overweight…you get the idea.  Lovely bits of classism that will surely help let everyone know that Democrats are the party that sticks up for the little guy.

If you know liberal assholes like this, please show them this article, and its follow-up, which quotes additional hard data.  Also show them to anyone you know who’s leaning towards the Tea Party and isn’t a rich person with no conscience.  Basically, the Tea Party is a movement of elites in red states, especially in the South, business owners who want to pay low wages and not pay for poor people’s healthcare.  It’s really the same class of guys who have, from slavery times on, not merely been racist but benefited financially from racism, because the way you keep employment costs low is to have a large permanent underclass that can’t vote.  (Or at the very least is gerrymandered into ghettoized Congressional districts.  Or who vote and aren’t counted–remember the 2000 presidential election?)

As always, follow the money.