Comment by giraffe_lady
17 days ago
How do you get from occupy to the tea party is the link this hypothesis is missing.
Tea party was the clear predecessor to the maga movement, with its nucleation point being simple racist backlash against obama and trump being personally & directly involved in stoking that racism. In retrospect it obviously laid the groundwork for trump's movement, and I can't see any direct link from occupy to tea party other than perhaps some individuals like tunney.
I think the Tea Party is only tenuously connected to Trump. A lot of his policies involve a lot of government spending and federal overreach, and his policies are often opposed by the Freedom caucus. Historically, anyway, right wing populism tends to follow the collapse of the radical left and becomes a dark mirror of those very same movements, attempting to absorb their energies (Steve Bannon’s Leninism, Trump’s workerism). The tea party was, conversely, the last cry of reaganism and the dream of mixing traditional life with libertarian economics, which was flawed from the start as it was that very same deregulation which led to our contemporary technologically inflected society where all social norms are broken for the sake of profit. So the tea party was not the legitimate bearer of world history.
I don't think we're on the same page here, I don't see that trump's policies are particularly central to the appeal or power of his movement. They aren't even important to trump.
The tea party was a right wing populist movement and maga is an extreme right populist movement that emerges a handful of years later, with astounding overlap in membership, and you don't think they're connected? ok.
I really don’t think they are all the same people. Some of the leaders, yes, but you cannot tell me that members of the general public who supported these leaders suddenly shifted from liberterians to authoritarians within a decade.
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