Scene from the Tea Party Fascist Rally Saturday October 12

This photo pretty much sums up the fascist underpinnings of the Tea Party movement. Like the fascist movements of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the Tea Party typically consists of retirees and pensioners, rural or exurban residents, and persons without a strong connection to mainstream organizations; that is "atomized" persons. Most of all, the demographic is characterized by a strong status anxiety which describes its core demographic: white men between the ages of 45 and 65.

Fascist movements find fertile soil where the masses have become un-moored from social and economic institutions or when those institutions have lost credibility. Charismatic leaders prey on the status anxiety that accompanies that economic and institutional change. Fascist leaders speak of "restoration" or national or moral renewal that will revive the fortunes of the nation or tribe and with it the status of those who have lost it. A mythic antiquarianism and the resuscitation of symbolic imagery from the past is employed to create a meta narrative and a corresponding political program
which drives the movement.

Fascist movements attack the foundation of traditional institutional life because institutions are a fundamental threat to the meta narratives these movements depend on. There is a profound difference between "meaning" as found in institutional authority and "meaning" created by charismatic leaders and reactionary movements. Institutional authority is built over time and represents the sum of that institution's experience with reality. An institution's understanding of reality and it's "meaning", though perhaps wrong in its particulars, is still rooted in an experience with it.

Charismatic reactionaries create "meaning" out of pure fabrication based on symbolic imagery shorn of historical context. That imagery is arranged into a political ideology of "conspiracy and destiny". Simply put, it posits that the tribe, whether nation, race, ethnic group or party, which was once great has been led astray and laid low by a cabal of insidious foreign parasites. These parasites seek to control and despoil the tribe by "contaminating" it with foreign elements whether racial, religious or cultural. As a consequence, the tribe is unable to realize its "true destiny" and has become lost. The political program of these reactionary groups always involves calling on the tribe to "wake up" and cleanse it of these parasitical elements.

The beauty of these reactionary ideologies is that they are not subject to the ordinary pressures of reason and rationality. They are not shaped by any experience with "reality". Because the underlying meta narrative is a belief in a secret conspiracy of hidden actors, the charismatic leader is free to shape his interpretation of events without reference to 'expert' opinion or verification. Contrary facts are dismissed with impunity and interpretations connected to facts are understood as manifestations of the conspiracy.