The Republicans seem to be counting on the parallel propaganda campaign of demonizing "guv-mint." They're pinning their hopes on an ill-informed electorate (especially white men) siding with "the one percent" over their own working- and middle-class interests.
The GOP hopes also may hinge significantly on how determined some whites are to get the country's first black president out of the White House. Historically, demagogic U.S. politicians have had great success in exploiting racial resentments, although these days often with coded language like Gingrich calling Barack Obama "the food-stamp president."
The Right also has worked diligently to create false narratives to convince many Americans that their hatred of a strong federal government links them to the Founders. Many Tea Partiers have bought into the historical lie that the Founders wrote the Constitution to limit the power of the federal government and to promote "states' rights" -- the near opposite of what the framers actually were doing.
Led by Virginians Gen. George Washington and James Madison, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 threw out the Articles of Confederation, which had made the states supreme and the federal government a supplicant.
The Constitution reversed that situation, eliminating state "independence" and bestowing national sovereignty onto the federal Republic representing "we the people of the United States." Contrary to the Tea Party's false narrative, the Constitution represented the single biggest assertion of federal power in U.S. history.
When the Tea Partiers dress up in Revolutionary War costumes, they apparently don't know that their notion of a weak central government and state "sovereignty" was anathema to the key framers of the Constitution, especially to Washington who had watched his soldiers suffer under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation.
And, when the Tea Partiers wave their "Don't Tread on Me" flags of a coiled snake, they don't seem to know that the warning was directed at the British Empire and that the banner aimed at fellow Americans was Benjamin Franklin's image of a snake severed into various pieces representing the colonies/states with the admonishment "Join, or Die."
Nevertheless, false narratives and false arguments can be as effective as real ones to a thoroughly misinformed population. Thus, many middle- and working-class Americans still cheer when Newt Gingrich references Ronald Reagan and his "supply-side" economics.
But the failure of Reagan's economic strategy should be obvious to anyone who is not fully deluded by right-wing propaganda. Not only has the national debt skyrocketed over the past three decades, but whatever economic benefits that have been produced have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy -- while the nation as a whole has suffered.
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