"There is a classic of the genre in today’s Guardian. George Monbiot describes the Tea Party as “one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen”, and goes on to explain that the poor, deluded saps who turn up to its meetings are puppets on the strings of two wealthy industrialists, Charles and David Koch.
A telling phrase, that, “false consciousness”. It was coined by Friedrich Engels, and became a mainstay of Marxist theory. Marx argued that, because proletarians didn’t always understand their true interests, democracy was open to abuse. Reactionary and bourgeois elements could make the workers think that they wanted one thing, when what they really needed was something else. It was the doctrine of false consciousness which Lenin and, later, Stalin, used to justify their tyranny."
And here's an article from the Washington Post with an opposing view of the Tea Party which I think gets its historical and economical citations all mixed up.
"In the worldview of the American right -- and the polling shows conclusively that that's who the Tea Party is -- the nation, misled by President Obama, has gone down the path to socialism. In fact, far from venturing down that road, we've been stuck on the road to hyper-capitalism for three decades now."
Whoa doggies. "Hyper-capitalism"? I disagree. Hyper-capitalism would be near elimination of government, a rejection of all regulation: no health department, not rent control, no taxes (!), etc. I can sort of see what he's getting at with maybe the lofty, hard to understand high finance stuff, but I think that phrase hyperbole.
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