Tea Party People

Like all other media outlets, the BBC is blithely reporting the US mid-term elections like any other political tournament. A bit like Final Score on a saturday afternoon with all the latest results from all the grounds across the country and their implications for league positions and the title race.
I don't think it quite understands the kind of mental turmoil the US is going through, which isn't that very different from the kind of social hysteria of Stalin's Terror, with logic and reason being bent out of shape in the hands of reactionary fear, and communities tearing themselves apart in a race to be the most ideologically pure. In this case the ideology being any means to prevent a democratically elected government executing its duties and pledges to the people.
The Tea Party and its accomplices do represent an attempt to subvert what there is left of US democracy. And it has the receipts to prove it. No movement with that amount of financial and media backing can be written off, and no movement with their policy of total negativism and denial and pure paranoid hatred can ever qualify as a genuine political ideology. They are a collection of the diseased. And so we are left with the only place for them, as the first modern fascist party - although perhaps Berlusconi, like his idol Mussolini, would claim to have been there first.
There are the usual assorted cranks who believe that the Tea Party are just cranks. That this is just business as usual then. Like in Munich in 1923, for instance. The kind of dear souls who believes that fascism was exterminated forever in 1945.
Apart from the darker possibilities, the immediate effects on millions of American lives, who face 2 years of administrative sabotage and inertia are enough to be alarmist about. But the truth about fascism is that it will always re-emerge at times of crisis, and always adapt the most applicable tools at its disposal. It is emerging now, and Fox News is its single main propaganda tool. Which puts it under the wing of one of the most powerful corporations in the most powerful economic sector of the prevailing technology of the day.
They are not cranks to be written off like some religious sect (though they are one) but a clear and severe symptom of a deep decay in american society, one which has cultural roots in America's origins, and in its testing of capitalism to destruction two years ago.