Statistics are powerful but sometimes we
don't do the math. What we can also glean from the above is that 60 percent of
the Tea Party are under age 55; 21 percent are people of color, and 39 percent
are women.
Some earlier stats collected by a
University of Toronto professor (reported with caution, though, since samples
were small) reveal that "there's a relationship between the amount of education
one has and the strength of their religious beliefs. Getting an education tends
to drive you away from the most fundamentalist religions. That's probably why
there's a smaller percentage of college educated fundamentalists (27%) compared
to moderates (39%) and liberals (51%)."
Then there are fundamentalists who earned
bachelor degrees from "Bible colleges," which are more likely to teach
creationism than are mainstream schools and universities.
According to the Bloomberg poll, again,
more than 44 percent of the Tea Party are "born-agains" or other categories of
fundamentalist Christian.
CNN, Bloomberg, the University of Toronto
professor? Two out of three, at least, are mainstream sources. I don't know enough
about statistics to modernize these stats on the basis of mathematical
probabilities, nor was I able to access more up-to-date figures.
There are many more conclusions possible
from the above figures. I choose to draw the conclusion I wanted to draw: that
a substantial percentage, maybe as high as 50 percent of Tea Party members, are
not as steeped in the Enlightenment culture that is still the theoretical basis
of our democracy as are others of us, classified by the University of Toronto
professor as moderates or liberals.
Add the above considerations to all of the
election corruption that interfered with an accurate vote count in 2010 (the
most corrupt election in U.S. history up until then) and acquire at least an
idea why the Tea Party gained so many seats in Congress and are running the
show even though a million more votes were gleaned by non-Tea Party candidates
who somehow were not seated in offices they would have won had it not been for
redistricting that clumps inner-city minorities into fewer and fewer electoral
units, paving the road for more GOP victories, and the beat goes on, with the
Electoral College another target.
The ruling "winner take all" will acquire
a new denotation. The GOP will take all through ingenuity. Whither the informed
public? Many minds will indeed be filled with misinformation.
Whither higher-level thinking? Get this:
McDonald's or Exeter/Harvard, no oxymoron in this topsy-turvy, progressively
(not in the political sense) less rational twenty-first century.
Prove me wrong. I will be vastly relieved.
After all, according to today's New York Times "Opinionator," Conservatives
believe that the cause of the "skills-based gap" is " educational
failure." Liberals agree. The gap "offers an opportunity to criticize our
government-run system of public education and especially . . . [you don't want
to read the rest]."
These same
conservatives also support withdrawing federal funding from sources of higher education
that persist in raising tuition.
Remember, the New York Times is studying conservatives
without mentioning fundamentalists or Tea Party people at all. The
conservatives include George F. Will and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who might think
twice when reading that "[s]ince 1979 the income gap between people with
college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has
grown."
So there seems to be
some hope, though the rest of the Times blog
advocates the revival of unions as a fundamental step toward righting (in the nonpolitical
sense) the economy, with which these same conservatives would likely take
issue.
But conservatives
are coming out against "educational failure." Is it too late? According to a
2010 Gallup poll, " Conservative Republicans outnumber moderate/liberal Republicans
in the general population by about a 2-to-1 margin; among Tea Party supporters,
the ratio is well more than 3 to 1." The "Opinionator" seems to define
Conservative as moderate/liberal or at least moderate. But who knows? The definition
should have been clearer.
Nonetheless, as I've
written before, my faith in the post-boomer generations persists. They must
channel all of their brilliance and creativity away from Wall Street to the
sciences. Because science holds answers that will save the world--the
environment, that is.
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