The tea-party assholes have hilariously worthless precedents – Slacktivist’s favorite, because he’s been on a semi-laudable indignation kick lately, is a group of petulant idiots that called itself Indignation in the 50s and 60s. What they represent right now is the right-wing fringe dusting the rust off of its paralegal oppression skills; while they didn’t technically control Bush II or his Barebones Parliament, placating them with shows of state force was a major objective of Republican policy for long enough that they’re now a major component of the GOP as an organization – too major to beat down or ignore in polite company.

Like the fascists before them, the teabaggers’ animating spirit is one which worships authority figures by general acclaim. They were loyal squadristi for Bush, and the unprecedentedly awful selection of Palin was in large part a misguided effort to get their gatekeepers to accept the Republican ticket as a new batch of Bold Leaders worth following off a cliff. Because of what drives people into the political right in modern America – identification with a mythologized white, monocultural rural ‘Heartland’ by people dependent on townships or large cities – Palin’s mob were middle-aged office types pretending to be angry old rural cranks. In groups they indulged in the only thing driving them as an ideology – a deferred culture. These are people who couldn’t tell cow from steer to save their lives and who subscribed to sappy Georgics by wealthy jagoffs; people who imagine black hordes teeming in the inner cities waiting to take their land away but who live and worked in the cities  and own the land on which their house sits if any at all; people who had never uttered a word in righteous anger but imagined themselves right-revolutionaries; Aryan separatists without any particular desire to separate themeslves; people who have bought a gun more than once but never a box of ammunition. White-flightists without anything to fly from, Goetz cheerleaders who would not save a fellow man if his mugger was an octogenarian.

It is only among one another, and when accompanied by their ever-indulgent cultural and political authority figures, that they can find cultural satisfaction. The Heartland per se has a rich and varied cultural life, but they want nothing to do with it and would generally mistake the average camper, shooter, or other outdoorsman for a hated DFH. So they must in some capacity attach themselves to leadership figures – little else provides cultural validation for the kind of person who tells others they like country music (I’ve heard this repeatedly, in spite of ‘country and western’ being the preferred term for what they mean) and yet will not sit through a C&W track that isn’t about ragheads.

They’re easy to please, these starved creatures; a lot of liberal writing about Palin misses how profoundly lazy she was even about what she was supposed to be good at – race-baiting. All it took was her butchering ruralist panacea by Hitler admirers to get them shrieking for blood on their own. It has been a hard time for them, because Palin – in spite of their fervent hopes – has been shown weak, and they cannot tolerate that even with all the media-blaming they’re capable of. They’re without a leader and desperate, and every time one comes along it turns out he’s unsuitable – philandering, brown, a terrible speaker, not willing to demand Samantha Smith be exhumed and burned at the stake on whistle-stops. The tea-party movement inadvertently gave them a new, inferior outlet; the idiots responsible, Armey and his 2.0 scene creatures, simply concieved it as another in an endless supply of corrupt Leninist vanguard spectacles; instead it took on a life of its own, a way of reliving that fascist Woodstock that was the Palin campaign.

But the problem is that certain obstacles exist to what the mob can be allowed to do if it has a head. Palin, in her resentful, dim way, understood that; she had Sarah to worry about, and the moment those hick idiots threatened Number One they were out in the cold. Fascist moments aren’t really meant to survive their leaders; I don’t anticipate the teabaggers surviving in any serious form past 2010, because either they will so obviously alienate the rural and exurban populace they parade around in a crude, savage caricature of that the Party will have to crack down, or because the even marginal success of the GOP will lead to an orgy of overreach followed by bone-crushing failure. After all, the mob might be the same type of people, but their manipulators are distinctly subpar, jumped-up frat-boys like Armey instead of the slick, professional corporate thugs that pulled their forefathers’ strings. They don’t have any concept of laying low, their idea of grand strategy owing more to 300 or high-school football than Grant or Caesar.

Even so, the guns are an unsettling development, and worse is the smarmy, evil complex of responses by their unhinged quasi-leaders. Part of the problem is that degradation of those leaders; nobody who actually believes in gun rights would be such an impossible tool as to suggest that carrying at a Presidential function is appropriate, let alone validate that view by trying to make the debate into one about perfidious Wobbly thugs agitating against pre-adult employment. For someone who did, even the best-case scenario that would produce – the gun-toting nuts petering out and the incident simply passing as an awful and singular one – would be a serious threat to public acceptance of their Second Amendment views. The worst-case scenario is like being a Carcano stockholder in 1964.

Their leaders are not ideoogues, or to the extent they are are only second to their allegiance to Number One. But even so, if they were cannier manipulators they would understand how horrible this is for everyone involved, not least of which being them. But they’re not. After all, you have to break a few omelettes to give 110%, don’t be niggardly, huh huh huh. Hut hut hike! You have the floor, Senator Douchefag.