Tea Party Activism and Two-Party Ideology

When the tea party movement began gaining steam last spring, the Democratic response was to tie it as quickly as possible to the Republican Party, in order to discredit it among liberals and progressives. Ironically, however, Republicans also sought to bind themselves to the movement, in order to regain credit among grassroots conservative activists. It is no coincidence that both Democrats and Republicans sought and still seek to reign in this movement by demanding that it be neatly fit within the two-party paradigm of the reigning duopoly system. But there is resistance in the movement. At The Bellingham Tea Party, Kimberly Fletcher writes that Rush Limbaugh is wrong to assume that tea party activists are simply "fed up with Democrats and the Democrat president":

I completely agree with Rush that this is a conservative movement, but he is equating Republican with conservative as if they are synonymous – and they are not. Rush insists the two parties are not the same, and while I agree that the platforms of the parties are dramatically different, the people serving in office are not. The Republican Party looks great on paper, but the people who call themselves Republicans (but for a few exceptions) either have no idea what the Party stands for or they just don't care.

The tea parties are not protesting a party; they are protesting an oppressive, out-of-control government, and both parties are guilty.

It wasn't the Democrats who pushed No Child Left Behind or the massive expansions to Medicare. It wasn't the Democrats who pushed through the $700 billion TARP. It wasn't a Democrat president who threw the Constitution out the window and expanded the powers of government well beyond the Constitution with the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. It wasn't a Democrat president that tried to legalize millions of illegal aliens and basically called the American people stupid and uncaring for fighting against it. This fight did not begin with President Obama, his taking office just escalated it.

The reason Barack Obama was elected was because of the two-party system. The people of America didn't know where else to go. How can you be heard when you are told you only have two choices and they both stink? In 2006, voters came out in mass numbers and voted Democrat down the ticket to "teach Republicans a lesson." Not only did that strategy not work, it totally backfired. In 2008, the people bought into the "Change" theme because that is what we all wanted – change in Washington. But the change we got was not what we were promised. We have taken the easy way out for too long. There is no accountability in Washington. There is no transparency. And the only way we are going to get it is to vote both parties out

Interestingly, rather than arguing for a third party option, Fletcher essentially makes a strong case against parties as such and for independent political activism:

Voting "third party" simply for the sake of change will only exacerbate the problem. We've already tried the changing of the guard, and it doesn't work. The answer is not to vote third party; the answer is to vote NO party! We need to stop voting by letters the way preschoolers color by numbers. It's time we take all the letters away and stop taking the easy way out. We need to vote people not parties, and issues not politics. That is what these tea parties and protests are about – taking the government back into our own hands where it was always meant to be. But if we allow Rush Limbaugh to convince us we are protesting a party and this whole thing comes down to Republicans versus Democrats, the movement will come to a screeching halt and we will lose all the ground we have gained.