The Tea Party and Republican "establishment" aren't that far apart ideologically, says Glenn Greenwald in Salon, so what's behind the civil war raging between the two camps? It's a class thing. From inside the Beltway, Walmart shopping Tea Partiers like Delaware's Christine O'Donnell and Nevada's Sharron Angle — even Sarah Palin — are "too harsh and declassé for our effete Guardians of Elite Political Power" to stomach, much less welcome into the "Ruling Class." Here's an excerpt:
The "tea party" movement is, in my view, a mirror image of the Republican Party generally.... It is dominated — in terms of leadership, ideology, and the vast majority of adherents — by the same set of beliefs which have long shaped the American Right.... I see little good in it and much potential for bad. To me, it's little more than the same extremely discredited faction which drove the country into the ground for the last decade, merely re-branded under a new name.
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