Who's in the Tea Party, who's not, and a gray line the Gray Lady didn't clarify.

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Star Spangled Banner by mrdonduck
   I wanted to write an op-ed attributing the rise of the Tea Party to the " the skills-based gap [. . .] because they [the Democrats] don't want to tell the working classes that they're losing ground because they didn't study hard enough."

    In other words, I wanted to say that the progressive [not in the political sense] declining emphasis on higher education was an outgrowth of the Powell Manifesto, which spawned a slew of conservative think tanks to counteract the creeping socialism brought on by the overeducated late-sixties college students trying to activate the values they were learning in school.

     "The poor we will always have with us," the far right might have responded, Romney's 47 percent--you know, those people who need help because all of the wealth was being sucked into the top one percent. I keep saying that destruction of the lower classes isn't the answer, because the host will eventually die out--no secretaries or janitors. And then what will happen to those CEOs helpless without them, the ones who take invisible "business trips" on their yachts for weeks at a time, unmissed?

     One day without the 99 percent cleaning up and pushing papers around will do more damage than the bursting of the real estate bubble. Or maybe a week without them anyway.

     But we can't afford to take time off from work. Too few unions survive to carry us through such unpaid furloughs, which could result in lockouts because the unemployment rate is so high--much higher than Obama's toothy stats inform us.

     I wanted to say that as early as 1984, twelve years after the Powell Manifesto was slipped to the right/right people, a report came out, "A Nation at Risk," decrying the deterioration of our educational systems that were graduating students unqualified to take on the responsibilities for which they were supposedly qualified. I taught some of them back then. Some were good, but others plagiarized. Others didn't want to have to put together a sentence, saying that they'd leave it to their secretaries. But my late father said that in the eighties he had to rewrite and correct letters written by his secretary on his behalf. As an immigrant who came here in his twenties, he spoke better English than the rest of his American-born family combined.

     I wanted to say that because students were so burdened by debt from heavy loans they have to take out to put themselves through our institutions of higher learning, they can't even afford to take the jobs they studied toward, even if they're qualified for them. So there's a massive surge toward Wall Street jobs, and science suffers as that small segment of New York City geography sucks physicists away from the creative research that so much more concerns our future than financial greed.

     I wanted to say that the decline in values is associated with the decline in the quality of our public educational system--producing the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmanns of this country, who don't know U.S. history from a hole in the ground. The latter announced that the American Revolution began in New Hampshire and that there was no slavery during the era that followed.

     I wanted to blame the decline in the quality of public school educators on the decline in the quality of public education and that both were producing boobs like Palin and Bachmann. An informed citizenry is necessary to keep democracy alive, said founding father John Adams, who might have added that slavery was indeed in motion in his day. George Washington was far less kind to his slaves than was Thomas Jefferson, who had a long-term romance with one of his, resulting in generations of black and mulatto Jeffersons. The Washington legacy is probably similar, though his only ["illegitimate"] descendants I have met were whiter than white, blond hair scarcely darker than their fair skin.

     In other words, I wanted to blame this whole mess on the Powell Manifesto, which indirectly, at least subtly anyway, downgraded the quality of education so that only the upper classes, educated privately, would be qualified to own the country, as many ignorant conservatives if not Tea Party people blatantly betrayed ignorance undetected by semiliterate audiences.

     The "man on the street," interviewed impromptu, doesn't know that Columbus discovered America, let alone the damage done to the indigenous peoples upon his arrival.

      All this I wanted to say until I read that the majority of the Tea Party, excluding the African Americans beginning to take on their values--move over, Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain--are white males, well educated, and affluent.

     Turns out that the "tea party" movement sweeping the nation is disproportionately composed of individuals who have higher-than-average incomes. It's also disproportionately composed of men. And disproportionately composed of white people. . . . "but not necessarily older

or just from the South."

      According to a Bloomberg poll, "[f]orty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as "born-again' compared with 33 percent of all respondents."

     Keep in mind, all the above stats were taken in 2010.

     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.

     I conclude with a one-word question: "How?"

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.