Perhaps ‘microcosm’ isn’t the best word; ‘personification’ might work better. The background: the Hill asked two bloggers – one from the Right, and one from the Left – to answer the question “Like Sen. Graham said, will the Tea Party movement die out?” The blogger on the Right was Ace of Ace of Spades, and contrary to his own self-deprecating later observation he answered the question perfectly well (and without venom, which will be important later on):

As a visible movement, getting media play and offering candidate endorsements, it might die – if both parties conspire to ignore its will and marginalize its agenda, as parties often have in the past, Tea Partiers might become convinced it’s futile and might lose the key ingredient for an energetic, vital movement: *hope* that it could actually succeed. Any movement can have the heart torn out of it.

But were that to happen, the Tea Party wouldn’t die so much as hibernate, waiting for the next Ross Perot or Rick Santelli to call the dormant order to arms once more. And with the Baby Boom generation on the cusp of retirement, and shiftless borrowing slated to equal nearly all of American productive output by the end of the decade, the calls to arms will grow louder and more urgent, not less.

As for his ‘opponent’ (they in fact wrote their pieces without knowing what the other would be writing): I’ll save you the tedium by just writing out the invective*.

…not have a coherent vision…blind hatred…revulsion of shared responsibility…rampant misinformation …conspiracy theories…right-wing fringe that predictably overheats…John Birch Society…militia movement…far-right faction…”death panel” smear…follow-up attack…far-right candidates…meager impact…right-wingers…

If you look closer, you’ll see why I called this a microcosm/personification.  The two authors had different objectives.  Ace’s is to bring in the Center and unconvinced voters to the Tea Party position; in other words, he wants to expand the coming wave.  The other guy’s was to reinforce his own faction’s prejudices and stereotyping, because he’s as convinced as Ace is of the existence of a coming Republican wave. In fact, this guy** is probably more convinced of the existence of a Republican wave than Ace is: generating this kind of Two-Minute Hate political porn is pretty indicative of a deep-seated worry that even usually-safe liberal districts aren’t, this year.

Which is a perfectly reasonable “worry:” they’re not.  Nice to see a tacit admission of that from the Other Side, though.

Moe Lane

*The guy’s also upset that the antiwar movement never got this kind of traction in their own policy goals. Given that one of those policy goals was getting the inhabitants of two countries killed because of liberal pique over the idea of a Republican President saving non-Europeans, I thought that I’d point that out.

**Use of “this guy” deliberate, of course.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.