The Tea Party is a Distraction from the Real Right-Wing Agenda

In an excellent piece over at Salon, Michael Lind describes the strategic agenda behind reactionary right-wing political mayhem:

Another mistake is the failure to recognize that the Southern elite strategy, though bound up with white supremacy throughout history, is primarily about cheap and powerless labor, not about race... 

The economic strategy is to maximize the attractiveness of the former Confederacy to external investors, by allowing Southern states to out-compete other states in the U.S., as well as other countries if possible, in a race to the bottom by means of low wages, stingy government welfare (which if generous increases the bargaining power of poor workers by decreasing their desperation) and low levels of environmental regulation.

If voter suppression and vote dilution strategies fail, the Southern conservatives can still try to ward off unwelcome federally-imposed reforms that might weaken control of the Southern workforce by Southern employers and their political agents, by policies of devolving federal programs to the states, privatizing federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, blocking the implementation of new federal entitlements like Obamacare or a combination of these strategies.

Spot-on.  Centrists, Liberals and Progressives overlook this at their - and America's - peril.

This - shutting down the government, holding the debt ceiling hostage, demonizing and sabotaging Obamacare - is not about crazy people ranting and raving and being unhinged.  It's about a particular class of plutocrats deploying the means necessary to enact a self-serving economic agenda that would have no hope of being enacted by actually democratic means - no mean feat in a democratic republic.  (These plutocrats are not exclusively Southern, but they are uniquely dominant in the South.)

The antics of the Tea-Party are not driving the right-wing agenda; they're concealing it.