The Coffee Party Kick-Off

It took a long time coming, but here’s the progressive answer to the Tea Party – the Coffee Party. Their slogan is “Walk up and Stand up,” and the official launch of the movement is tomorrow at a coffee shop near you.

Find a Coffee Party meeting near you.

http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/

The Coffee Party appears to be a lot more organized than the Tea Party. Now the question is, can they make a difference? For all its fits, screeching and screaming, the Tea Party hasn’t had much of an impact on the political process, despite the fact that they take credit, or are credited, with accomplishing things that they had nothing to do with (e.g. Scott Brown’s victory in Mass. in January).

Here’s the Coffee Party mission.

The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

President Nixon Library of Congress

President Richard Nixon warned about the so-called silent majority. It was part of Nixon’s “southern strategy.” The silent majority was made of up white Americans, Sarah Palin would call them “real Americans,” that didn’t cotton to fancy newspapers, books, higher education or black people.

Well today, Nixon would be proud to see his once silent majority is screaming their heads off. They’re shouting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and they even have their own cable news network.

But the once silent majority is now a minority. Forty years ago, uneducated, racist, misogynistic, lovers of hate and true believers probably were a majority of Americans – at least in the south – but not anymore.

Demographics have changed considerably since Nixon was running the show. Now more people live in cities and urban areas than they did in the 1960s and ’70s. Doing so, means more people are confronted with living with “those people.” And when they do, many of them realize that “those people” are a lot more like themselves then they had believed. Cities force people to get along.

And while there will always be ignorant racists in the US, racism has been thoroughly marginalized. Hatred of “other” was a key component to the success of Nixon’s southern strategy. If that hatred existed today Obama could not have become president. If Obama had run against Nixon in 1972 rather than McGovern, he would have lost every state in the union.

Obama’s election in 2008 is compelling anecdotal evidence that today most Americans don’t have the energy, desire or time to spend hating other people because of the color of their skin.

And so what we’re witnessing on Twitter and Facebook, blogs and Fox News the once silent majority screaming their heads off because they have lost the war. Progressivism won. Despite the calls by Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck to go back to the good old days when blacks had separate bathrooms and schools, women weren’t allowed to work and white men ran everything – it’s not going to happen.

The United States, along with the rest of the world, is moving forward. We will stutter-step backwards on occasion, but if we take a long view of the path forward, despite the screeching and flailing from the losers, we’re on a path of progress.

This story was originally published on The Neal Jeremy blog and has be republished here with permission.

Gary Gnu

Sarah Palin has achieved what Ralph Nader never could – she’s the leader of a populist revolution. Palin is successful because she appeals to the lowest common denominator and progressives, like Nader, appeal to high level intellect.

Palin sees the world in black and white. She often refers to her “solutions” as simple and common sense. Palin’s for freedom, free markets and lower taxes. These are easy concepts for her to sell because Palin avoids detailing any proposals that would actually solve any of the problems this country faces. Her speech at the tea party convention last weekend was a series of poorly written slogans and catch phrases. She told the audience everything they wanted to hear.

Progressives on the other hand see the world in shades of gray. They understand that health care reform is a complex problem, the solution therefore is necessarily complex and requires more than three words to explain and understand.

I’m not saying that all Americans are stupid, but 300 million collectively are not that intelligent. And the anti-intellectual streak that permeates our culture makes it difficult to explain complex problems. Some things are require more than “Got Milk?” marketing tricks. Also, unfortunately critically thinking is just not taught in most high schools – that’s hurting us as the world becomes much more complicated and politicians hone their ability to lie.

But rather than offer counter proposals and honestly challenging the Democrat’s health care reform, conservatives resort to slogans and misinformation. They call the president a communist. They accuse Democrats of nationalizing health care and setting up death panels. It’s easier for conservatives to just push American’s buttons. Communist. Socialist. Death panels. Prominent conservatives today are just not honest brokers in the nation’s political discourse.

So when it comes to global warming, health care reform, unemployment and fixing the economy, progressives are labeled as pointy headed intellectuals while conservatives mock them and spread lies appealing to their base’s base instincts.

Rather than trying to “reach across the aisle,” Democrats should just go it alone. If Republicans want to filibuster their legislature – let them. They held up civil rights legislation in the ’60s for almost three months.

Force Republicans to bring our legislative process to a halt and see how that works out for them. While they might not succeed, if Democrats truly embrace the progressive agenda and educate the people about their policies, enough people will get it and those that don’t – oh well.

David Brooks wrote today about race. He said that the 9.12 tea bagger protesters actually mingled with a group of African Americans who happened to be in the nation’s capitol celebrating their culture. For Brooks that anecdotal story of white folks and black folks hanging out is proof that race isn’t an issue.

“These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.”

Wow, so you’re saying that black people can wax eloquent too, just like whites, even though blacks come from a polar opposite of whites in terms of politics and culture. Yeah there’s no way an African American could have to deal with anything remotely similar to whites – total opposites – like black and white.

But you see these people didn’t start beating each other, so to Brooks racism isn’t an issue any more around here.

“There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.”

Yep, nothing to see here, no racists. Nope. None. Immigration!

The real problem is those damn militant progressives trying to drop the hammer on the working man like they always do.

“And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.”

Yeah those left-wing fascists are ruining this great nation. It’s not those right-wing-pro-business-overt-capitalists who’ve been running the country since at least the eighteenth century. It’s those damn liberals and their filthy welfare, and their all like totally militant about it too. First it’s Social Security, then it’s Civil Rights and Medicare and now they those militant fascists want to provide health care to everyone – even blacks.

“Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.”

Yeah Obama screwed up the economy back in 2007, became President in 2009, then maniacally instituted a federal takeover of all industry. Total commie bastard move.

“Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.”

See, it’s always been this way. Well, of course, most of the stuff blamed on Obama actually started during the eight years George W. Bush ran the nation and none of these particular “progressives” gave a crap, but hey it has nothing to do with skin color, it’s just that Obama really pisses off a lot of people for no apparent reason. It’s not that he’s black though, because the tea baggers would have been protesting Bush’s expansion of the federal government, rising health care costs and sinking wages, but there just needed to be some match to ignite the fire in their bellies. What’s different? Hmmmm

“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.”

Wait, so the news media is populist and the tea baggers are progressive? I’m confused, I thought the news media were liberals and the tea baggers were conservatives, now they’re “militant progressives.”

“‘One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,’ the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. ‘The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.’”

I’m sorry but to refer to progressives as “elite” is too funny. Now sure there are progressives who are part of the elite, but real progressives and liberals are not part of the elite. Not if you define the elite as people who have all the real power in the nation, they certainly aren’t progressives. All throughout history the Establishment has violently crushed any and all leftist outbursts.

Now it’s true, as Brooks points out in his column, that during Andrew Jackson’s tenure as president, there was a strong push for more democratic control of government, but a) Jackson didn’t create that desire b) most people in the US couldn’t vote – so to overstate this fervor for democracy ignores the fact that blacks, Native Americans, women and anyone else that didn’t own land couldn’t vote.

But for Brooks these African Americans who mingled with these so-called progressives on 9.12 without murdering them is proof that race isn’t an issue. Nothing to see here.

“It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.”

I got your deep and old – right here.

Read Brooks’ column