Last Friday, I said that the problem with the Democratic Party’s base is that they are too willing to accept at face value the statements of their party leaders and too quick to be satisfied with crumbs thrown their way in the form of victories on social or symbolic issues.

What is going on with the Republicans is more interesting than what is going on with the Democrats because the Republican base has become more feisty and less trusting of their own leadership and are showing signs of developing a healthy cynicism. The tea party rebellion was the result of the Republican Party faithful waking up to the fact that their own leadership was also manipulating them to advance an agenda that was not in their own interests. For a long time, the Republican Party leadership has managed to fool their followers in the same way that the Democrats do but their followers seem to have wised up earlier.

The slow but steady decline of the white middle class, the mass base of the Republican Party, who are losing jobs and seeing their lifestyle lowered, has been causing simmering discontent for some time. There seems to be an almost palpable feeling that the country is in a state of decline and when that happens people tend to want to assign blame. The tea party members have a vague sense that the outsourcing of jobs and the financial shenanigans of Wall Street are the cause of their plight, as can be seen from their hostility to the bailouts and their ‘buy American’ form of patriotism. But because of their ignorance and naivete about politics and how things actually work, they have been suckered into thinking that the reason that things are this way is due to ‘big government’ and that cutting taxes for everyone will shrink the government and thus somehow miraculously get them out of their plight.

The tea partiers that demand less government do not realize that their anger is being used to target those agencies of government that keep rampant corporate greed in check and that the more those agencies are constrained and eliminated, the more we will be at the mercy of big business interests. The goal of big business is to eliminate or undermine all those government agencies whose purpose serve as watchdogs for the public but which put a crimp on their unfettered search for ever-increasing for profits. Those agencies like the IRS, SEC, OSHA, FDA, BLM, and EPA are meant to balance the needs of the corporate sector with the welfare of individual citizens who lack the money and other resources to fight on their own.

While the base of the Democratic Party tends to make excuses for their leadership’s fecklessness, the base of the Republican Party at least has the gumption to take to the streets and make their leadership sit up and take notice. It is true that the tea party is largely white, well-to-do, older, and has in its ranks racists, xenophobes, homophobes, and outright nutcases. Its ranks contain people who are so out of touch with reality that they seriously think that Obama is a Kenyan and/or Muslim and/or Communist who has a secret agenda to destroy the country by imposing a socialist dictatorship mixed in with Sharia law or that the health care reform package that the Democrats passed is a government takeover of the system.

The tea party is also shackled by anti-intellectual pride and complacent ignorance that has enabled obvious grifters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to turn their anger away from the true causes of their decline (which is the oligarchy seeking an ever-increasing share of wealth) into resentment against minorities and the poor and foreigners, coupled with hot-button social issues like abortion and gays, all wrapped into a single anti-government and anti-tax package.

The Republican leadership clearly is aware of this unrest and is nervous. So far, the they have managed to ride that tiger but its position is precarious. While they were able to win significant legislative victories in 2010 by pandering to their base and making unrealistic promises, we see them now warily wondering how to appease their followers to distract them from the fact that those promises cannot and will not be kept. They made a big issue out of the budget deficit and the national debt and promised to bring both down, when in reality their obligations to the oligarchy will increase both. They are walking a knife-edge and they know it. In order to disguise their inevitable sell-out, we can expect to see another major effort to gin up major controversies on social issues in order to distract their followers.

Whether the Republican Party base will wise up as to what is really going on and realize that the groups they are currently being made to hate and attack as the cause of the nation’s problems (minorities, unions, the unemployed, the poor) are in the same boat as them and shift their focus to attacking the oligarchy or whether they will continue to be sidetracked by false issues and thus eventually wither away into sputtering incoherence remains to be seen.