The rise of the Tea Party Movement has had a deleterious effect on the Republican Party, leaving in its wake the defeat of a solid conservative Republican who dared to defy the extremists of the movement, who have promoted irresponsible rhetoric and advocated right wing populist ideas!
Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina is one of the victims of the movement, a person with a solid conservative record in the House of Representatives, but unwilling to go along with the irresponsible statements, actions and beliefs of this right wing populist movement!
Inglis will leave Congress at the end of this year as one Republican who refused to call Barack Obama a Socialist or contend Obama does not have a birth certificate! He also believes the politics of personal destruction is wrong, and that global warming really does exist!
Inglis does not believe in tearing down institutions or promoting character assassination, which he contends the Tea Party Movement is active in advocating! He calls the Tea Party right wing populism as similar to the French Revolution in its irresponsibility! They are acting in a demagogic way, and he worries that it is destroying mainline conservative values!
Another Republican similar to Inglis in views and attitude about the Tea Party Movement is the defeated Utah Senator Robert Bennett, who is being replaced by Tea Party favorite Mike Lee in January!
Many mainstream conservatives are concerned, as Inglis and Bennett are, that the Tea Party radicalism will lead to the destruction of the GOP, and that it is a danger to the political stability of the nation!
In many ways, it can be compared to the anti immigrant, extremist views of the American Party, known unofficially as the Know Nothings in the 1850s!
Ignorance, prejudice, nativism, and hatred, combined with extreme libertarianism and constitutional “originalism” in the direction of Justice Antonin Scalia’s 18th century views is a threat to the future of the nation, and we are now at a crossroads of potential division the most dangerous since the Civil War! 🙁