David Frum: What Tea Party really stands for: Screw Young in Favor of Big Govt for Old White People
David Frum’s analysis via Ezra Klien…
David Frum:
Post-2008 hard-right conservatives did rally around one new idea: the Ryan plan praised above by William Voegeli. And what was the Ryan plan? Simply this: a plan to load almost all the burden of fiscal adjustment onto Americans under age 55, while largely exempting Americans over age 55. Even beyond the Ryan plan, the Tea Party championed causes dear to the hearts of retirees and near-retirees. Remember, the issue that launched the Tea Party in the summer of 2009 was…opposition to Medicare cuts for current beneficiaries. That’s a strange rallying cry for a purportedly limited government movement. Once you begin to think of the Tea Party as a vehicle for advancing the economic interests of the old against the young, though, a lot of otherwise mysterious behaviors suddenly begin to make sense.
So now the “Get your socialist govt hands off my medicare” makes more sense to me reading that. The Tea Party and by extension the whole limited govt movement has been about a certain demographic wanting all the govt goodies for themselves (because they deserve it and it’s not socialism if they earned it) and none for the “others” and the “others” are usually the people this old demographic hates like “minorities” or “hippies” or whatever which they charge is stealing their hard earned white people money (even if they had govt jobs and pensions, etc).
