Tea Parties, Mimetic Rivals, and Hope

From a mimetic theory point of view, it was predictable that the tea party phenomenon occur. With the election to the presidency of the United States of the most leftist, progressivist, pro-abortion, socialist-like, and oligarchical candidate imaginable, there was an inevitability to the rise of the tea party movement.

Some, wrongly, want to accuse the tea party folk of having surreptitious racist motives. This is nearly as Procrustean an accusation as, say, the New Atheists' accusation that anyone who does not view reality like them solely through the empirical method criteria are "dim".

Mimetic theory posits the "problem of the doubles" in all conventional cultural structures. One might assume that a Democrat president in the Oval Office would find his "model/rival" across the aisle in Congress in the form of Republicans. The problem with this assumption is that there is an increasing awareness that in actuality there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Hence, the inevitability of the tea party phenomenon: a structurally authentic "double" had to arise in the mimetic swirl, and it has.

Is this a good sign? Not really. I place no hopes in the tea party uprisings, at least no hope for it to help bring about a renewed and vital Christendom. At best, it may like Pentheus in Euripides' play The Bacchae, put the clamps on the skid into the sacrificial vortex for a while. The neo-pagan resurgence coupled with the Scimitar's demographic victory in the West seem all too preponderant in force and scope for the largely middle to older-aged tea party folk.

That does not mean, however, there is no hope. Rather, it means that unless you want to have your hopes dashed once again, you had best place hope - and faith and charity - on sources of true transcendence still availing us, even in these darkening ages.