Recently, I was reading David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 Years, and it struck me that a large part of the Tea Party belief system is communist in nature.
This is most apparent in their nativist attitudes and anti-illegal immigrant fervor. Basically, they argue that illegal immigrants are "stealing" American jobs. But how is that possible when the businesses that are giving illegal immigrants jobs are privately owned? How can Tea Partiers believe that the jobs located in America and provided by private business owners belong to America at large? The fact is those jobs don't belong to Americans but to anybody the business owner chooses. (Note: there are no similar complaints about "American" jobs that get sent to China.)
Tea Partiers have also been known to whine about "wanting their country back," but their claims to the country as a whole don't extend beyond what they themselves own, at least under their view of capitalism and free markets. What the Tea Party is really arguing is that society OWES them something, which means they're really closet communists.
