Is the Tea Party the Klan Revisited?

If you hang with Tea Party people, as I had the good fortune to in Nicaragua, you end up coming around to a lot of old resentments. The Confederacy quickly pops up, still fighting that war. Yup. Anti-American subversives come up: They include Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, the Japanese, for God's sake, mostly anyone who has a different racial trait, anyone who speaks with a foreign accent, anyone who voted for Obama. Many of the conversations I overheard were long on the Constitution, short on any amendments that have been added in the last hundred years.

Even the US military is filled with chickens. We shouldn't have lost in Vietnam, we should have nuked Iran already. Blacks should go back to Africa. Muslims are all terrorists. Obama is a Muslim. We still resent all the abolitionists, the effete East Coast intellectuals. Sissies. Don't even get into the Civil Rights times. Everyone involved was a communist. Especially Bobby Kennedy. He was a communist and anti-American. Where was the death penalty when it was needed? He and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Bobby Seale, they all got what they deserved.

Nearly all this came out in the first five minutes of any conversation. Their enemies also included abortion clinics, black churches, Muslin gathering places. As I would run away from these hate sessions I always had an inner picture of white robed men burning crosses in yards and bombing churches. They were (are) righteous and Christian and strong supporters of the American way. I think their transformation into the Tea Party is mostly about wearing different clothes, and arriving on a far bigger stage. I still hear nothing but hatred, bullying, racism and a sick kind of righteousness.

I was happy to hear parts of the Young Republican's critique of the party today. They think many of these attitudes are archaic. The young don't understand why the elders hate homosexuals so much, for instance. This is good news. We need a lot more good news in the direction of recognizing our mutual humanity and saying "No" to the ideas of the new, Walmart version of the Klu Klux Klan.