I think that those members of the GOP who are really Tea Party members in elephant's clothing are too diverse and un-nail-able-down-able in their many outlooks to be so easily deemed a GOP cure all. I am especially alarmed at what seem to be the only two traits that are actually common to most of these Libertarian-ish people who back-doored themselves into the GOP.
First, I see them as reactionary and not proactive, meaning they are usually
against stuff and rarely
for stuff, seeking to do away with negative this or that but never seeking to institute positive thus and so. This sets a tone of antagonism and a perpetual attack mode. A perpetual tear-it-down mode. I much prefer to play in the sandbox with people whose main focus is to build new sandcastles and not shove their foot through other people's existing ones. (Yes, some rather odious sandcastles definitely need to be eliminated, but tear-it-down seems at times to be the ONLY selection on the Tea Party's transmission stick-shifter. And no pun intended but .... YMMV.)
Second, I see way too many them as lacking in any awareness of the historical background and seasoned wisdom needed to avoid repeating some of the worst blunders (and even the worst atrocities) in political history. I am specifically pointing to such face-palm moments as Michele Bachmann who
famously said she thinks it would be a good idea for the media to publish lists of those politicians who are "un-American" in their political outlook, not realizing she was proposing an eerily similar repeat of McCarthyism and the life-destroying blacklists that resulted from the House Committee on Un-American Activities back in the 1950's. She epitomized that day exactly the kind of misguided zeal and road-to-hell-good-intentions that make me shake my head at the lack of wisdom of such a huge group of people who market themselves as being the only ones out there with any common sense. (Bachmann was almost immediately enlightened by several of her trusted peers to apprehend the heinous blunder inherent in her statements. And after she saw the light she
backpedaled recanted publically. But it took people who DID have a grasp of history to show her that she in fact did NOT have such a grasp. And my point here is that she is not a minority in having that kind of a lack in her political/historical education.)
I do think SOME aspects of the Tea Party are good. But I also think that because there had been such a lack of passion (such as 1960's style passion) in American politics for so long, that the Tea Party's deeply reactionary DNA became an instant magnet for all things antagonistic, which is another way of saying too many of today's adherents to the Tea Party and Libertarianism are operating from a base of too much emotion and not enough reason. Thus they accidentally became a smorgasbord/composite movement of so damned many platforms of extra-heated anger and headstrong causes.
