photo by GL

Markos writes on what the right wing teabaggers achieved with their demonstrations Wednesday, as opposed to what liberal bloggers have done over the past three years:

It wasn’t the protest movement that moved the Democratic Party left on Iraq, it was Joe Lieberman’s loss in his Democratic primary in 2006. Prior to that, Rahm Emanuel, as head of the DCCC, was telling Democratic candidates to steer clear of the war. After that primary, the Dems fully embraced ending the war in their campaigns and won huge that fall. In other words, the anti-war cause was best served via electoral politics. After Lieberman’s loss, not even the media could ignore the saliency and validity of the anti-war position. "Patriotism" could no longer be used to silence anti-war voices, we had helped mainstream them.

So now conservatives are out in the cold, far from the levers of power. They are feeling marginalized, ignored, powerless. We know the feeling. It wasn’t long ago that we were there. But instead of adopting the tactics that best served liberals on our way back to power, conservatives seemed to have learned the exact wrong lesson, adopting our most ineffective ones.

And having decided to do street protests, rather than learn from the people that have done effective street protests (like the pro-immigration forces), they decided to go the Code Pink/ANSWER route.

He’s certainly right the efficacy of the Lieberman challenge vs. the silliness of the teabaggers, but I think there are other meaningful distinctions.

The liberals who challenged Joe Lieberman were angry at the Democratic Party and were sending a message. But while the teabaggers were overtly threatening moderate Republicans to toe an extremist line or suffer their wrath, the liberals were warning the Democrats that they were out of touch with the vast majority of the country who were sick of the war and wanted out. We were an independent political movement that shifted the discourse to reflect where the country actually was, and directly paved the way for Barack Obama’s election in 2008. What we did would have been impossible without broad public support for our goals, which mostly went unnoticed by those trying to paint us as "radicals" who were attempting to "purge" moderates from the party.

To the extent that the teabaggers are not aligned with the GOP, it only reflects the tensions between the party and those who fund their big institutions who are constantly pushing for the advancement of their own economic interests. The nebulous goal of the teabaggers — such as it is — is indistinguishable from the Club for Growth. They want lower taxes. That’s great, everyone would like lower taxes, but what they usually wind up fighting for is lower taxes for the Scaifes and the Olins, not ordinary people. The Club for Growth is an unofficial enforcement arm of the GOP, not a group of dissenters. And they want to achieve their goals by cutting programs that have broad public support, like Social Security.

There aren’t a lot of people willing to take to the streets to make that happen, so the whole effort was suffused with a troubling racial subtext that the organizers of the protest were only too happy to exploit with a wink wink, nudge nudge. Michael Steele? Don’t even bother. The PUMAs, who have never heretofore promoted any kind of fiscal responsibility message, were out in force. The only theme that seemed to tie it all together, as many photo essays have documented, was opposition for one reason or another to a widely popular president.

Newt, Dick Armey and other "organizers" actually did fulfill their goals — they made money on both ends. The cash flowed freely from the right wing institutions, and they expanded the lists that they’ll work for mobilization and fundraising. Which they’ll exploit promoting the interests of right wing funders, which they’ll of course get paid for. The "new generation" of online consultants got to put their talents on display in a giant publicity stunt, so they’ll be able to compete for their share of the bounty, too. Erik Kantor gets to look like there’s a movement behind him, it’s a win-win-win all around for the GOP establishment.

And the teabaggers themselves? They get nothing except the ability to show up and hang out with other people who hate Obama, and show the world that their articulated message is completely incoherent. But hey, they got to see their faces on Fox News. In other words, they were willing chumps for the GOP once again.

Nobody involved in this equation on any level has any higher political thought than their own personal gratification and enrichment, and certainly no interest in challenging the GOP establishment. They’re not going to copy our efforts to drag the party in a broadly populist direction because it’s the last thing in the world they have any interest in doing.