No, the Tea Party Is Never Going to Join Up With Anti-Corporate Liberals

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This really can’t be said often enough:

I’m afraid we need to call B.S. on this idea of Elizabeth Warren (or any other “populist”) becoming a pied piper to the Tea Folk, pulling them across the barricades to support The Good Fight against “crony capitalism.” Yes, many “constitutional conservatives” opposecorporate bailouts. But they also typically support eliminating not just subsidies but regulation of big banks and other corporations.

That’s from Ed Kilgore, and he’s responding to the suggestion that the real divide in American politics isn’t between left and right, it’s between pro-corporate and anti-corporate. Spare me. Sure, the tea partiers opposed TARP and were hazily in favor of just letting all the banks collapse in 2008, but that was little more than a fleeting morsel of emotional outrage. As Kilgore says, tea partiers may say they oppose corporate power, but when it comes time to vote, they can be counted on to support the folks who oppose any and all regulations that might actually rein in the power of corporations generally and Wall Street in particular.

But every once in a while they’ll get themselves exercised over some trivial issue of “crony capitalism” like reauthorizing the Export-Import bank, and suddenly pundits will rediscover the supposedly populist right. Give it a rest, folks. The tea partiers will no sooner find common cause with Elizabeth Warren than they will with Mother Jones. In reality, they couldn’t care less about ExIm or the swaps pushout or any of the other shiny objects that right-wing fundraisers occasionally find useful for replenishing their coffers. On the economic side of things, what they care about are low taxes and slashing welfare. On the social side of things, they care about abortion, guns, gays, and the moral decay of everyone else. The rest is just fluff.