Jay Nordlinger thinks "teabagger" could be like "the n-word"(via TPM):
When I was growing up, in Ann Arbor, Mich., there was a little debate: Should school officials try to prevent black students from using the N-word? I don't believe the issue was ever settled. And this brings up the question of whether "teabagger" could be kind of a conservative N-word: to be used in the family, but radioactive outside the family.
I wrote about oppositional culture and a certain segment of conservatism earlier this morning, responding to Sarah Palin dipping her toe in the birther cesspool.
Oppositional culture generally develops among minority groups in response to an oppressive society that isolates and dehumanizes them. The oppositional elements of black culture developed over centuries of slavery, racially oppressive violence, segregation, and a campaign of philosophy and pseudoscience designed to deny black humanity that has morphed into the more subtly essentialist messages we see today. Oppositional culture is kind of like an emotional reflex: A society says you're worthless, so you question, deny, or subvert the values of that society*.
I'm not saying oppositional culture is always bad, in fact I think it can be essential to challenging those social assumptions that produce it in the first place. But I am saying that the elements of black oppositional culture that conservatives single out as pathological -- conspiracy theories about AIDS for example -- developed in part because of centuries of oppression.
All that happened to conservatives was that they lost an election.
-- A. Serwer
*(Sometimes in the attempt to do so, you inadvertently embrace those same values.)
