Our pal Meg Lanker has been dealing with some Tea Party drama over in Wyoming. Here’s a sample from her piece on the matter:

The Tea Party’s influence might be waning in other parts of the country, but here in Wyoming, its influence is growing — particularly in certain pockets of the state. As far as I’m concerned, these people are not patriots. They are opportunistic, paranoid weasels, just the type that Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his seminal 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style of American Politics. As Hofstadter warned: 

“But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high…

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

The Cody-Big Horn Basin Tea Party may as well have existed in 1964, in the McCarthy era, and in the 1850s when the Know-Nothings plotted to wrest control of the government and oust the Catholic and immigrant menace.

Not exactly the most fun-sounding thing in the world, is it? Read more over this way.