Lost in the clamor about Sarah Palin’s resignation were two developments that provide persuasive evidence for the proposition that a renaissance is in the offing for the conservative movement, properly understood.
First, there were the crowds that thronged to the latest round of Tea Party Protests, with many of the attendees marveling at their first-ever protest. The mainstream media barely noticed, obsessing on Michael Jackson’s passing and heaping more derisive commentary on Palin.
But for those paying attention, the July 4th Tea Party Protests offer more concrete evidence that what began as a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens standing up and shouting “Stop!” to the politicians and media mavens is becoming something more enduring and substantial.
In Dallas, for example, an estimated 37,000 protesters assembled despite the kind of roasting triple-digit temperatures that can turn north Texas into a cauldron. Several thousand each showed up in places Little Rock, Flint and Kansas City, and crowds of varying sizes in hundreds of other cities, towns, hamlets and burgs.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but the July 4th holiday saw as many as 1,500 cities with Tea Party Protest events across the country. More significant than the gross numbers, though, is the evidence of growing web-based organizational sophistication, with a variety of online tools to help protestors find each other and get organized.
Dallas organizer Katrina Pierson described the impetus behind the movement as “a lot of people [who] are just tired of hearing politicians talk because there is no action.” Her group is mounting a neighborhood organizing program that reaches beyond Texas. She also told a Fox News interviewer that “we’re going to have some big news coming out in a couple of weeks.”
While I have no idea what that “big news” might be, I do know this: The “experts” in Washington, New York and elsewhere in the eliteratti are missing the biggest political story of the year – a growing grassroots protest movement that is independent of the two political parties and that is united by an aversion to “politics as usual.”
Here’s my thesis: Tea Party Protestors are the advance guard of an emerging wholesale national rejection of the liberal Democratic vision that empowers Washington politicians and bureaucrats to go on taxing, spending and regulating the U.S. into a sad state of sickly socialized progressive decadence. The Europeanization of America is doomed.
Then there is the remarkable finding by the latest Gallup Survey of a growing conservatism across all sectors of the American political spectrum.
“Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven’t changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left,” Gallup said in describing its data.
The across-the-board trend to the Right follows Gallup’s report earlier this year that 40 percent of those surveyed now consider themselves conservative, the highest level seen since 2004. These results are in marked contrast to the 2006 and 2008 elections which returned liberal Democrats to power in the White House and both chambers of Congress.
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have vastly over-reached, moving to the far left with record levels of deficit spending – massive tax hikes to follow – aimed at creating a suffocating regulatory monster devoted to running every facet of everyday American life.
What The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins Jr. calls “the spastic descent into machine liberalism – government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on” is not what most Americans voted for in 2006 and 2008.
Obama and the Democrats have shaken the common-sense conservative majority that makes America a center-right nation to its roots. They are finding their voice as they shake off the Republican corruption-induced coma of the Bush era.
And they will be heard by both parties.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk.
