Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
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Sarah Palin on Twitter

On February 10, Sarah Palin tweeted a public birthday greeting to Glenn Beck: “Happy B’day Glenn Beck! Ah, the wisdom of our elders…” Apart from the feigned folksiness of the word “B’day” and the astonishing attributing of wisdom to Glenn Beck, the tweet primarily declares an attempted strategic alliance. Self-professed “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck soon reciprocated by suggesting one of the few strategic alliances described by the American Constitution: “Happy belated birthday to my younger friend Sarah. Let’s just have a combined party in 2013, to save the WH pastry chef some work.” So, however jokingly it may have been put forth, we now have the proposition of a Palin/Beck ballot in 2012.

This twittering mating game may not disclose actual political plans and aspirations on behalf of Glenn Beck but Palin has declared herself ready and willing if not rough and ready, she has publicly cuddled up to elderly wisdom, and the wise old man is apparently going along as far as the ride will take him. Both twitterers seem to be flaunting blatant political opportunism in a giddy, frivolous manner indicating that whatever they are doing, it is working.

This, of course, annoys the purist. Self-declared founder of the Tea Party movement and undisputed “President/Founder” of www.TeaParty.org, Dale Robertson, recently warned his fellow teabaggers against the Republican “NeoCon” attempts at taking over the movement:

“I am sending an alarm to the Tea Party membership! Be alert to turncoats and deceivers being herded into the Tea Party by usurpers from the weakened Republican Party for the sole purpose of capturing our populist movement. Our political ideals were once theirs and our immense growth has created a lusting for their good old days!

Sarah Palin’s well delivered speech and her attractive demeanor is little more than a veneer for her less attractive political philosophy. She seems more like a duck out of water among true Conservative Constitutionalists. Palin demonstrates her NeoCon flippant viewpoint and her naïveté as she seems envious of the swelled numbers of Patriots pledging their allegiance, to of all things, AMERICA and not to a kool-aid ridden political dinosaur.”

Glenn Beck on Twitter

The enemy here is the Republican Party, a “political machine that erodes the fabric of our Patriotic soul.” The Tea Party movement, on the other hand, is described as an independent, spontaneous group of “like minded Patriots, not the actions of one person, but countless Patriots acting as one.” The GOP worries about stealing votes, while the Tea Party “places restoring the Republic and returning America to common sense government as our core platform.”

It is interesting that the GOP is presented as running on Kool-Aid. As is explained on Wikipedia “Drinking the Kool-Aid has become a common phrase owing to the beverage’s alleged role in the Jonestown Massacre, and is used to insinuate that one has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications.” If the “republican elite” are nothing but wolves in sheep’s clothing, trying to steel the momentum of the teabaggers, they are surely better described as cynical, whereas the “countless Patriots acting as one” in the hailing of non-negotiable core beliefs seem more thirsty.

“The common thread running the length and breadth of this government is a Common Sense Constitutional Conservative Approach to self-governance.” Maybe you actually need to drink some of the tea-flavoured Kool-Aid in order to make sense of that concoction of coltishly confused alliteration. “Common sense,” in its populist usage, is nothing more than a feeble attempt to hide “nonsense,” while trying to express a “no bullshit” approach to, in this case, that most sacred document (for teabaggers at least): The U.S. Constitution.

Dale 'Tea Bag' Robertson

The “common sense” “core beliefs” mean to portray themselves as the very authenticity of the American soul. It is the tireless defense of “time tested conservative principles.” It is the original American Dream vs. spectacular republican mirages ¹. It is “the greatest thing going since 1773″ and the GOP is trying to get in on the teabagging action. This is why Dale Robertson repeats the phrase “I say NO and HELL NO!” three times, and the term “non-negotiable” five times. The political stratagems of Sarah Palin do not comply with the purist stance, seeing that she supports “Open-Boarders McCain.” (for more info, read this). She is not loyal, she is more interested in her own strategic position than promoting the “countless Patriots acting as one,” she did not drink the Kool-Aid.

But of course, once your non-negotioable core beliefs claim absolute authenticity, your movement will soon need purification by steadily ostracizing any single individual who dares speak on behalf of the “countless Patriots acting as one.” Because, evidently, they do not act as one. This is why there are so many warnings about straying too far, cf. a commentary on politico.com:

“I say again, be careful, Tea Party Nation. You are being infiltrated. You are being compromised. You are being neutered. Stick to your principles. Stick with the Constitution. Keep opposing unconstitutional, preemptive wars. Keep calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve. Keep fighting for less taxes, reduced federal spending, and states’ rights.”

Common sense is nourished by fear, the unifying force of the fear that all that is solid melts into air and that evil others are contaminating your self-evident truths. This is also seen in Glenn Beck’s 9.12 project and his attack on the book The Coming Insurrection ². Teabagging as a patriotic pursuit is an act of fear expressed through the desperate search for a world that makes sense. And so common sense – the one “we” have in common and which distinguishes our authentic “we” from the spectacular elite others – is found in the non-negotiable principles of the Constitution and the Bible. The second amendment and Leviticus 20:13 tell us that guns are good and gays are bad, end of discussion. It is the pursuit of an authentic unifying identity by means of readily available ideological bric-à-brac: National and religious origins all rolled up in to that one weird concept Patriotism.

The interesting bit in this excessively banal phenomenon is that it is exceedingly widespread in the western hemisphere. France is debating national identity, Denmark is debating national identity in a slightly less formal but every bit as ignominious way. This is why teabagging as a patriotic pursuit should not be ignored. It might be banal, it might be so innately inconsistent that it is doomed to slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard, but the movement is presently uncomfortably real. Should the political system succeed in their current attempt at tapping into the Tea Party energy it will create a political force to be reckoned with. And then a Palin/Beck ballot suddenly seems like more than frivolous flirtations and twittering temptations of two tea tray twirling twits.