What Is a Group, Really?
A group is defined by what its members share. So what binds the Tea Party crowd together?
In Payson, the answer is uncomfortably clear. They share a fondness for political lies, paranoid rumors, and the comfort of a very small world where complex problems always have simple villains. Our town is burdened with a Tea Party faction that yearns for a mythic past—white dominance, gun-slinging bravado, and cowboy-hat masculinity that mistakes bluster for strength.
Tea Party women seem unbothered by crude men who treat them as second-class citizens, as long as those men shout the right slogans. Trump is adored precisely because he mirrors the Tea Party mindset: nothing is ever his fault. Every failure has an external enemy. Biden caused it. Immigrants caused it. Democrats caused it. Someone—anyone—but them.
Grievance is the Tea Party’s organizing principle. Their followers are convinced they’ve been wronged, that they are victims of forces beyond their control. They are assured, repeatedly, that their disappointments have nothing to do with poor choices, incuriosity, or a lifelong avoidance of reading, education, and intellectual honesty.
A Tea Party meeting resembles a revival tent for resentment. It is part church, part therapy circle—though not one aimed at healing. Like an AA meeting run backward, it doesn’t confront addiction; it feeds it. The addiction is to Fox News, to fear, to slogans masquerading as ideas, and to stories so short on facts they fit neatly into a headline crawl.
In the end, the Tea Party doesn’t offer solutions. It offers absolution—permission to stop thinking, stop learning, and stop taking responsibility. For some, that’s an irresistible comfort. For Payson, it’s a continuing curse.
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