The Tea Party, Austerity, and the End of Western Hegemony

A series of mishaps has struck a resurgent, albeit tea-infused, Republican Party. Rich Lott (R-Ohio) was exposed by the press for dressing as a Nazi... for a war reenactment... that didn't include any genocidal references, bad taste, bad politics, but not necessarily anti-Semetic. Before that Delaware Republican Senate candidate, Christine O'Donnell was exposed as a "witch" who on a decades old video clip says "I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven.”
Interestingly the clip hit the Internet just days after she stunned longtime congressman Mike Castle in the GOP primary in her third bid for Senate.
It would seem the Democrats were party to a bona fide, that's right, witch hunt!

Most recently a politically significant, however underreported nationally, story came out of Arizona, "The office of Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has been locked down due to the presence of a suspicious package covered with swastikas. KVOA reports that an "envelope containing white powder" was mailed to Grijalva's Tucson office. Bomb technicians are reportedly on hand" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/21/raul-grijalva-suspicious-package_n_772166.html).

This episode will likely galvanize the Hispanic voting public both in Arizona and nationally because it serves as a non-verbal reminder to a major minority population that "hey vote for us or get THAT".

Could all of these recent disclosures be more than politics as usual? Could it be part of a larger effort to destroy the Tea party?

We may never know. However there is another unique development surrounding the Tea parties success and subsequent national media developments- the GOP (Grand Old Party i.e. the Republican establishment) is working against the Tea party.

To illustrate how keen the Republican establishment is on trying to crush the tea party, notice that the party is under attack from the likes of former Republican speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich and Michael Steel, Chairman of the National Republican Committee. Indeed the Republican establishment has funneled millions of dollars to boost main stream candidates in Republican primaries (http://thinkprogress.org/teaparty-primaries/). True conservative stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh and Mike Huckabee are defending the Tea Party but all in all the Democratic and Republican establishment are on an all-out offensive against the incipient "tea-baggers".

So why is there is so much bipartisanship effort directed as halting the Tea parties advance?


We should begin by asking: if the tea party takes over the Republican party and thus congress, does that mean we can expect real austerity measures, like those inching their way through parliaments in Western Europe?

Athens burned, Sarkozy is facing a fierce street-fight over his efforts to raise France's retirement age from 60 to 62, and the UK has passed a measure to reduce overall government expenditures by 18 %, a measure that includes the layoff of over 500,000 public sector employees -one third of its public workforce.

Will we go that route with the Tea party in power?

If so do we realize that austerity measures for America would be Ron Paul-like. They would probably include disbanding our ubiquitous military bases and pulling our forces out of places like, South Korea, Germany, Japan, Taiwan (Yes it costs a million dollars a day to fund an aircraft carrier we have 10)?

But it also means that the sprawling military-industrial complex, that Eisenhower forewarned will dissolve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower), and the subsidized-induced R&D innovations, like the internet, will no longer emerge with expected frequency. We will lose our technological edge -if we haven't already.

Yet our austerity measures will have far-reaching implications. Unlike Europe's localized measures the dissolution of global American power leaves the West with no shield from a variety of economic and political threats. Not that China wants to destroy us, but if we pull out of Asia, we, and the West, will loss our preferential access/relationships to the fastest growing region in the world. It could even result in the de-democratization of much of the developing world.

That’s right, at end of WWII America supplanted the British military as the protector of the global Western enterprise. Britain was happy to transfer the its strategic military position to a kindred-western spirit, after all it allowed them to maintain their economic power. Who will take our place, who will be the West’s America? India -the most populous democracy in the world- is not yet mature enough to take on that daunting challenge. Europe has its own debt crises, and has already exchanged its armies for universal health care and the likes. America like Europe has a massive debt crisis, but we borrowed more to supplement our military than we did to create a welfare-state.
European austerity affects Europeans; austerity for America could change the entire geopolitical landscape.

Tea party austerity may very well mean the end of a Western-Democratic streak dating back a little over 500 years to the reunification of the Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella.
This may explain the almost conspiratorial nature of recent revelations concerning Tea party candidates. It may also be one of the few developments significant enough to stimulate bipartisanship.

In any case this generation of Americans may be witnessing another watershed development in our world’s cyclical evolution.