Tony Blankley, the esteemed Washington columnist, had an interesting piece on Nov. 4 pondering the implications of the election two days before. He made some comments that are of interest here, considering that the Tea Party is a new movement outside the traditional political structure:
(T)he way many Americans are looking at their lives and the country’s problems may be changing so profoundly that the existing political institutions are simply drifting toward irrelevance. Until something more useful comes to hand, the public will continue to go out and vote for one of the parties, but it should not surprise us if radically different methods of solving our problems are embraced while voters leave both the Republicans and the Democrats indifferently as drying bones on an ancient landscape….(T)he now-tested availability of the internet as not only a fundraising device but also an organizing mechanism really does render the political parties redundant. They exist largely out of historic habit. If they don’t deliver (or worse, if they are seen not even to try to deliver), it would not take much more political energy than now exists just to walk away from them.
