Tom Junod at Esquire has an important take on the nature of the Tea Party and the oddity of how these folks, who are generally among the winners of our society, feel as if they are put upon minorities and losers. Junod calls them the “Sore Winners” and uses the example of a friend of his. This friend has a good life, he is well-off and he and his family have everything they need and many luxuries. Rather than feeling blessed, they feel somehow persecuted by those they consider “less deserving” than themselves.

Indeed, he wasn’t as happy for himself as he was pissed off at everybody else. He was pissed off at President Obama, for the health care bill and for the promise of higher taxes. But mostly he was pissed off at a system that he believed to be rigged, in favor of… well, President Obama, but also illegal immigrants. Those taxes he was paying? Illegals didn’t pay any of them. That health-care bill he hated? Illegals were going to benefit from it. That school his son was going to attend in the fall? He’d be going to a better one, if his last name was Gonzalez.

That last bit is demonstrably false, of course. White males, especially well-to-do white males still get the best of everything in this country. But I don’t think they’ve ever been more whiny, more touchy-feely offended at having to share even a little of life’s bounty with women, minorities, immigrants, all the others who have dared to step out of their allotted place.

Republicans, who once decried the rise of identity politics, now practice it so relentlessly, so ruthlessly, and above all so successfully that they’ve created a beleaguered minority where only a cosseted majority stood before. It is a kind of super minority, its material well-being encroached upon by the swelling ranks of the shiftless poor and its spiritual well-being encroached upon by shadowy “elites” whose figurehead is in the White House.

Yes, the Tea Partiers are basically the Republican base. They may lean a bit more libertarian and less socially conservative than some others in the Republican base. They may not include as many of the neocons who have run the party for so long. They are not particularly oppressed economically, educationally, professionally, but they sure are angry at a changing world, and offended, deeply, that they are slipping away from what used to be “the natural order”, with themselves alone at the top of the heap.

It’s a great article. Read the whole thing.