WSJ: “Progressive Tea Party,” You’re No Tea Party

WSJ: “Progressive Tea Party,” You’re No Tea Party

Kimberley Strassel over at the Wall Street Journal has some good advice for the “progressive tea party” “resistance” “movement”:  don’t go down the path you’re on because it’s based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the Tea Party.

Strassel writes:

The conservative tea-party phenomenon is overall one of the more successful political movements in modern American history. Even the left acknowledges it now.

. . . .  Consider the recent rallying cry of progressive star Markos Moulitsas. “The Tea Party didn’t really become a force until it started ousting Republicans it didn’t feel represented them,” he told the New York Times. “Democrats either need to feed, nurture and aggressively champion the resistance, or they need to get out of the way in favor of someone who will.”

Message: Get with our agenda, or be purged. The progressives showing up for protests and demanding Supreme Court filibusters are determined to move their party aggressively to the left. Any Democrat who does not sign up for their policies and their resistance will face a primary.

. . . . The tea party erupted for a lot of reasons, but a big one was frustration with Washington business as usual. Activists in the main weren’t demanding the Republican Party become something new, or ultra-right-wing. They were demanding the party—beset at that time by logrolling, earmarks and corruption—simply hold true to its stated and longtime principles of free markets and limited government. It was a quest for a better-quality product, not a different one altogether.

. . . . The original tea party was about making conservatives in this center-right country act like conservatives again. The progressive tea party is about making Democrats in this center-right country act like Bernie Sanders. Have at it.

She’s right, and I hope they don’t pay any attention to her at all.

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