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*Another* faux-populist Lefty group for potlatching money?

Is 'potlatching' even a word?

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  February 27th, 2010 at 09:34 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

(Via Big Government) It’s interesting to see the difference between intent and result in this Washington Post article on a quote-unquote ‘Coffee Party’ that’s ready to take to the streets on behalf of the Left.  It’s not really quotable, but the gist of the article is that there’s this movement that showed up in reaction to the Tea Party folks and is trying to duplicate their success.  Slow going, but it’s early days – and besides, aren’t both groups looking for the same thing, really?

That’s intent.  The result is a tacit admission that the Tea Parties have pretty much brushed aside the existing, decades-old infrastructure of Lefty activist groups to become the standard by which community activism is judged.  I imagine that this would probably upset, say, somebody who’s been throwing money at groups like Moveon.org or CAP or the undead, unlamented ACORN; it must purely grate to know that all the funding in the world won’t create a genuine populist movement when there’s no true popular will behind it.  Not that these Coffee Party people are the answer, either: they’re just a bunch of reactionary defenders of the existing self-defined privileged class who are attempting to create a false revolutionary consciousness.

…You know, I wrote that out first as a joke; but that really is what they are, isn’t it?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

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COMMENTS

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  • WarEagle01

    start riffing on “Coffeebagging,” another perverted practice with which both undoubtedly have some experience.

  • Jeff Weimer

    And, on the very same day, the LA Times puts out it?s take on the Tea Parties and the people who populate them:

    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ellis25-2010feb25,0,3374643.story

    Wanna bet the attitude taken is just as fuzzy, soft-focus, and respectful? I didn?t think so.

    But seriously, the Post was on a roll yesterday. This article, the Dana Millbank cheerleading, and this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022505767_pf.html.

    Really, WaPo, ?meets need?? It?s like you?re the daily Newsweek.

  • WarEagle01

    I’d say sometime between the 5th and 16th, considering that what she does for a living is truly medieval.

  • johnt

    much anymore. A liberal could hardly get through a sentence without praising and citing the need to rouse said grassroots, the seeming bedrock of democracy. Now they have to create a rent-a-mob of nitwits to clamor for servitude, immense deficits, and, bless me, higher taxes. The real thing bothers them.

    So “grassroots” goes the way of privacy, choice, dissent as patriotism, and others in the exceedingly volatile and expendable liberal lexicon. Meaning. they believe in nothing and don’t even know they believe in nothing.

  • Wubbies World

    Is government the problem or the solution?

    Tea Party says the government is the problem. The Coffee Clatch says the government is the tool to solve the problem.

    I am all for Friedrich von Hayek when he argued that socialism can’t work as an effective system for producing and distributing goods because it has no way of aggregating the necessary information about people’s wants and needs. By contrast, the price system of the market is a very effective method for collecting and using information about people’s preferences and the relative value of different goods. Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is the best short statement of this argument

    This is the very heart of the political struggle today. Coffee or Tea, I’ll take Tea.

  • marie_a

    This pull quote says it succinctly:
    “The Coffee Party believes the middle is consensus. The Tea Party believes the middle is the Constitution.”

    We tea preferentialists are not ground up in consensual coffee filters, instead we stand up for rock-solid rights and principles, with our tea moniker based around the historic events of America’s founding.
    We are in no way holier than others. We have made our faux pas when it comes to standards and frugality. But now we realize this: from the big government on down to the individual citizen, the profligate spending and ?ber regulating legislating must end. The time is now.

  • charlesmartel

    The problem with this, and any other wannabe leftist TEA Party equivalent is this: The TEA Party began and has flourished because those involved felt – rightly – that they had no voice in our country today, that they were being ignored or outright mocked by government and the media. The TEA Party has given us back power and a voice.

    Any such group on the left is going to run into the very real problem that they already have a voice. The media, Hollywood, academia, basically the entire government – they’re all saying the same thing this Coffee Party will be saying. And the movement loses any motivation and drive right from the get go.

    Glenn Reynolds quotes re a similar, earlier failed Lefty movement: ” ‘I don?t really understand what they?re about other than ?we don?t like the Tea Party? and ?we?re for a better process.?? That’s not going to inspire anyone, except maybe a few idiotic pieces in the WaPo and Salon.com.

  • redneck_hippie

    which is tainted by SEIU, ACORN, Landrieu, et al. My reaction to coffee party is they wish they were truly in the majority and they know they’re not. Pitiful sheep who complain about the process will not realize that tyranny is the essence of collectivism.

    The point of tea versus coffee is simple. Tea won. Coffee merely grants acknowledgement of that fact.

    Coffee has always made me perk up. This pathetic movement is no exception.

  • mustango

    …what Air America was to conservative talk radio. A pale imitation based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original successful.

    Of course a lot of the blame for this falls on the shoulders of the Olbermann/Maher/Stewart crowd, who have spent months being all about misinforming their viewers about the nature of the TEA party.

  • redneck_hippie

    Daniel Hannan responded to commenter via his blog at Telegraph:

    @RichardCalhoun: Yes: the TPA are superstars, and I am working very closely with them.

    @RuleBritannia: Splendid. See you there.
    Daniel Hannan on Feb 25th, 2010 at 6:22 pm

  • hickorystick

    “The Coffee Party believes the middle is consensus. The Tea Party believes the middle is the Constitution.”
    I for one am glad they finally found an industry and market they can support. We Seattleite’s have been drinking coffee and bching about government and the process for a long time. Since they are just getting started, in the spirit of cooperation, I’ll offer them something to discuss at the start of there meeting. Ronald Reagan started an “Operation Coffee Cup”.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs
    The coffee gals could also discuss advances in medical technology. NASA’s spending is often justified by the discovery of the transistor. The Chinese discovered the compass, but made little use of it. It takes a free market and hopes for a profit, a very large fortune making profit, to spur innovation and risk-taking. The government enviroment does not encourage either. Private medical firms have created all kinds of innovations based on the transistor, including CAT scan, Ultrasound etc. The Seattle community has contributed a great deal in medical technology, and in hospital organizational structure. So gals, go ahead and attend your coffee party, on the way to the Doctors office. Just remember the free-market and local communities have created the best medical infrastructure in the world, not government. The Constitution gaurenteed the freedom to do this.

  • leonie

    Potlatch is a Haida word referring to a huge party during which the most wealthy man in the area works hard at gaining even more prestige by giving away everything he owns.

    Interesting concept, isn’t it?

    –Le

  • http://sisu.typepad.com Sissy_Willis

    See also Kyle-Ann Shiver’s “Soros: Another Golden Match for Arianna” in today’s The American Thinker. http://bit.ly/9YZmvl :

    “Arianna Huffington, is as closely linked to George Soros as a woman could get without being in an actual bed with him. Soros used Arianna Huffington as the public face and co-stager of his Shadow Conventions in 2000 …

    “In the lead-up to the Shadow Conventions, Time magazine did a piece on Ms. Huffington’s newfound love for liberal politics which hinted at Soros’s shadow influence, naming him as the convention’s largest individual donor and noting the extreme liberal tone of the events in spite of their bipartisan billing. Time’s author noted that only three Republicans (John McCain was a keynoter) were slated to speak, and that one of those was having second thoughts, evidently due to Soros’ backing. This was in sharp contrast to the image Ms. Huffington was attempting to project as the voice of a new ‘grassroots’ and ‘bipartisan’ political coalition. ”

    No wonder the truly grassroots and, yes, bipartisan tea partiers terrify these deeply disingenuous astroturfers.

  • http://www.politicaljules.com politicaljules

    Of course this movement will be embraced by the progresso-liberals. It will never be called astroturf although that is exactly what it is.

    We all know it is acorn renamed and is funded by moveon/CAP/Org4Amer etc.

    It will have to be funded to survive, and will never take root because it has no roots.

  • qixlqatl

    since ‘leftism’ requires filtering out a lot of inconvenient facts to retain the appearance of viability