Eric Alterman: More Tea Party fiction

  The number of Americans who call themselves members of the Tea Party is down to just eight percent, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. This is just one-third of the number of Americans who claimed membership in April 2010, shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Twenty-four percent was never a very high number, particularly given the breathless press coverage the movement inspired. This is, after all, a country where the majority rules. But the decline to 8 percent—a far smaller percentage of Americans than even those who claim to believe in UFOs—is entirely predictable in hindsight, considering just how much nonsense one had to believe in order to take seriously the absurdities that Tea Party leaders spouted. The movement’s leaders spewed so many simultaneous falsehoods and contradictions that it was a full-time job merely to try and track them.