Lefty bloggers often use "get the popcorn" and similar phrases when they anticipate being entertained by conservative infighting. If Salon's Heather Digby Parton is right, popcorn consumption in the netroots will be sky-high a little over a year from now for a "political cage match of epic proportions" between "two grotesque phantasms": the Tea Party and the mega-rich. The prize for the winner: the Republican party.
Digby believes the upcoming clash wouldn't even be happening if not for the GOP establishment, which, after all, "created the Tea Party out of that original white, working-class bloc [of former Reagan Democrats] by feeding their prejudices and stoking their insecurities."
From Digby's Thursday piece (emphasis added):
Reagan Democrats...were described that way by Stanley Greenberg, the pollster who coined the name for working-class whites who came to see the Democrats as being obsessed with the poor, the unemployed, feminists and people of color at their expense. This is the cohort that both parties considered the Holy Grail for many years. In fact, it took Barack Obama putting together a winning coalition without them that finally got the Democrats to stop chasing them like a bunch of One Direction fan girls (Rascal Flats groupies, more like it) and accept that they had happily become Reagan Republicans long ago...
...Those who financed the conservative movement very carefully nurtured the so-called Silent Majority of white people who didn’t hold with all that pointy-headed multiculturalism or welfare queens and feminazis — the hardscrabble Real Americans of the heartland who loved flag and country. If the big GOP donors have been watching “Mad Men” reruns and think they’re financing a movement of Wall Street traders and Junior League housewives, they’re on the wrong channel. They need to turn on “Duck Dynasty” and get themselves some guns.
One of the major gripes among liberal activists over the years has been the fact that rich Democratic donors meddle too much, particularly in comparison with the Republican billionaires who have typically just signed the checks and left it to the conservative movement political pros to spend the money wisely. But that may be changing. No, it’s not that the Democratic donors are signing big checks and leaving it to the grubby operatives; the GOP big donors are now meddling too. According to the New York Times, they’re no longer willing to defer to party elders and want to be involved in strategy. They’re even starting their own political shops to do it “in house.” Welcome to our world, Republicans.
For the past couple of years there has been much rending of garments in the Republican political establishment over the Tea Party dominating the GOP and running it into the ground. But they created the Tea Party out of that original white, working-class bloc by feeding their prejudices and stoking their insecurities. Now their monster is out of control and they don’t know how to lure it back into its cage. But the Tea Party isn’t their only fantasy creature. Perhaps their greatest achievement is the mythic Genius Plutocrat, the Ayn Rand Galtian hero whose courage, intellect and overall superiority in all ways is demonstrated by the singular fact that he has so much money. It looks like that beast has escaped his leash as well and the two grotesque phantasms are destined for a political cage match of epic proportions in 2016.
