I recently asked the question here and elsewhere: "Who are the tea partiers/tenthers and what do they want?" (Their own original name was much more colorful...)This reply was delivered to a different venue as an unsigned attachment. I apologize to the author for my inability to properly credit him/her. The inability of our educational system to instill a proper civics lesson in students. The result is that too many people have absolutely no idea about how to exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Without a proper knowledge base in the electorate, jingoism and completely wrong ideas about the proper function of government are allowed to take root and grow like weeds, clogging the entire process. Except for the growth of the massively profitable security state, the ability of government to deal with the needs of most Americans is left to rot. Americans routinely give up most of their hard fought rights to those police and security state tactics. (Somehow the right to bear arms is given preeminence above all others). The result is a cult of insularity and selfishness and an overwhelming sense of misplaced entitlement and a fearful sense that others than themselves may be able to reap the "benefits" of our society. As in, they want the benefits of a civilized society, but aren't willing to pay for it and allow it to function in an egalitarian fashion. At no time do they ever realize that people like undocumented workers and women and minorities in general are still treated as second class citizens in this country.Basically, teabaggers have absolutely no idea how things are supposed to function and they suffer from a massive case of cognitive dissonance in regards to their role in a properly functioning society.The second problem is the massive corporately sponsored propaganda campaign that takes the place of the inadequate civics education. The result is corporate personhood, the overwhelming influence that money and corporate concerns have in the halls of government over the needs and concerns of the majority of Americans. The corporations are then given carte blanche to exploit and abuse workers, promote legislation that usurps the basic needs of people to make a proper living in our relatively huge economic system. Since the corporate masters depress wages and earning potential by forcing American workers to directly compete with people earning paupers' wages overseas, they are directly responsible for restricting access to wealth and concentrating a higher percentage of it among fewer and fewer people.This adds to the sense of powerless that they already have from not knowing what their true role as citizens. The fourth estate, already owned and instructed by their corporate masters, are complicit in promoting disinformation and distraction to keep most people in the dark. Behaving quite like fifth columnists. An improperly educated electorate routinely sends people to government who are co-opted by corporate influence, or are just too incompetent to take their responsibilities properly. So, we end of with corporate whores, weaklings and hypocrites of either party, who are all too happy to serve their grey suit wearing masters.It falls to an un-coopted media to expose this insidious connection, very loudly and very frequently.The result of overwhelming corporate clout is a sense of corresponding overwhelming powerlessness and the frustration that ensues, all taken advantage of by functionaries who hail from the very same source of these problems; the corporations and their whores in the government and the media.And again, that plague of cognitive dissonance prevents our teabagging friends from seeing the root of the problem.As an addendum, about the issue that teabaggers, who on one hand declare that they AREN'T racists, but on the other routinely they use rhetoric straight out of an anti-civil rights rally from the 1950's, I chalk that up to their inability to work through the aforementioned cognitive dissonance. These people, and I'm sure that they are from the least culturally diverse areas of the country, have absolutely no idea what constitutes bigoted thought and language.That lack of exposure, coupled with the all too human tendency to blame people unlike themselves for their own problems is the cause why we see the high level of resentment against President Obama's non-whiteyness, undocumented workers and people who are generally unlike themselves within the teabagging rank and file.Unless there are some radical changes with the cultural and age demographics in the problem areas of the country, that teabagging mentality will pretty much persist.