Why the Right-Wingers of the Tea Party Movement Will Always Be War Mongers

This post first appeared on No More Mister Nice Blog.

No.

This has been another episode of Easy Answers to Stupid Questions.

And we knew this even before Gallup and The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza announced the recent discovery that teabaggers are — duh — Republicans:

“Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene,” Gallup Poll director Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the results, which were culled from national surveys conducted in March, May and June.

You shouldn’t need data to figure out that antiwar feeling will never truly take hold in the tea party movement. Teabaggers are just old-fashioned angry, resentment-driven right-wingers; in America, for at least half a century, angry, resentment-driven right-wingers have been defined by their contempt for educated coastal elitists, nonwhites who won’t stay in “their place” (the back of the bus a few decades ago, Mexico today), and whatever enemy is being sold by mainstream-right-wing jingoists as the Hitler du jour. What defines you as a full-throated rank-and-file right-winger in this country is contempt for people in all three categories, and a sense that all three represent more or less the same unsavory force that wants to take away your guns and religion and gas-guzzling cars and country music.

Even if it’s your kids who are being killed and mutilated in the latest war, you won’t turn against it. You won’t even turn against it if a (barf) Democrat is running the war, even a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Democrat, because you’re conditioned to think that every war is a blow against people out there in the big, scary world who don’t think the way you do, and a blow for the simple values of the Christian God and America.

I know there’s a subset of the right that likes Ron Paul’s opposition to foreign entanglements, but mostly that group consists of college kids. They are not to be confused with the tea party core.