Via the always excellent Digby, a fascinating, in-depth pair of articles from a regular attendee of Teaparty functions in the upper midwest confirm what I’ve observed more loosely among several friends in Texas and Florida. The Teaparty was quasi-independent of traditional Republican culture war dogma, at first anyway. But no more. That movement is long gone:

I concluded that trying to figure out what they wanted was a dead end because what they wanted was simply to complain—that the Tea Party “is not a group of listen and respond; this is a group of respond and respond.” Two years of Tea Party functions later, and I finally know what the Tea Party wants: A Christian nation.

Back in 2008 when AIG became the people’s insurance company, the ancestors of todays whacky teabaggers had already coalecsed around Ron Paul. The Texas congressman had carved out a niche for disaffected conservatives fed up with George Bush’s serial cluster-fucks. Especially Iraq, the biggest foriegn policy blunder since Vietnam.

Paul railed against foriegn intervention, and built up his credibility among younger voters by dismissing conservative opposition to gay rights and the endless, hopeless War on Drugs. By the time Bush handed Wall Street hundreds of billons in taxpayer dough and trillions in no interest loans, Paul was well positioned to capitalize on the GOP’s sudden affection for socialism — socializing the losses that it. And well they should have been. It was the biggest heist in history, where the very people who ruined the economy were rewarded with a trainload of cash which they promptly used to fund a generous round of bonuses for themselves. In 2008, after Obama won by a landslide, Republican was almost a dirty word. Conservative policies had failed on every level, in full view of the entire nation. That’s when the Teaparty as we know it was born, even the term Teaparty was coined in early 2009.

Then a funny thing happened. Key Teaparty leaders were bought out by traditional conservative money bags pushing traditonal conservative policies, those that didn’t cooperate were marginalized. In two short years the movement was completely coopted, the anger was expertly channeled away from GOP bank bailouts and constitutional violations, and focused back onto the usual on boogey-men of deficit spending, abortion, and Obama the Kenyan Marxist. The religious right walked right in, hand-in-hand with the usual suspects, apologetics in hand, and before you know it the same people who had been up in arms about bankstas and big government Republicans were lining up in droves to cut Wall Street taxes and enact the very same policies that fueled Teaparty anger in the first place. Most were whipped into such a fury they didn’t even notice the bait and switch.

The proto-Teaparty started out saying how much they loved the Constitution, a claim they stll make when they’re not trying to pass laws on what women can do with their uterus or who can marry who, leaving them with a sticky problem today. The religious right wants a sort of theocracy, a Christian nation, with a specific neo-medieval fundamentalist Protestant flavor of faith empowered above all others. Something that is about as Unconstitutional as possible. But they’re well on their way to getting around that obstacle by creating a comprehensive fake history, similar in some respects to the fake science of creationism, where democracy and the Constitution all derived from the Bible. A topic fellow FTB’er Chris Rodda covers brillianty at This Week in Christian Nationalism.

Watching what happened to a once semi-soveriegn movement that made some credible points over the last two years has made me appreciate my own rising star, the progressive netroots. Unlike the Teaparty, we were kept at arms length, or plain shut out, by nervous democrats after supplying a big part of the energy, money and votes that put them in power. There was a time when that stuck in my craw, politics can be ugly and so many democrats have no spine. But now I see some glimmerings of a silver lining: they were tricked and now they’ve been had. We got to keep our independence and our integrity, the Teaparty has already lost both. Along the way they’ve been made the scapegoats while the wealthy and powerful quietly harvested the economic and political benefits, leaving the vast majority of grass-roots activists who poured their heart and soul in to the original movement with absolutely nothing to show for it.