I’m not surprised to hear this. The coffee party (let’s call them CP) was doomed from the start. Why? It was a top down construction of left wing propagandists and those sorts of fabricated movements have needs that the CP could never hope to meet.
It had no core principles to stand on. We know from the CP themselves (see here,) that there was a lack of issues focus but it’s a bigger problem than that. Being a recovered moderate myself I can tell you that when what you think you believe cannot somehow be linked to some consistent metric or core value you don’t actually believe in anything. You risk becoming a leaf and the wind that moves you is as capricious as your most recent whim–be it one that occurs to you on your own or something someone else (the media or a trans-formative figure for example) convinces you of from moment to moment.
Left without an anchor and lacking a reliable lens or filter, everything becomes subject to change; response is based on emotion or selfish wants and personal pleasure–the only answer to every question becomes “will this make me feel good about myself or is this good for me?” But we already have a movement like that, it’s called the new democrat party.
The Coffee Party was a knee-jerk construct of disconnected, big-money, left-wing elites who had no hope of understanding why the Tea Party started or attracted so much interest. But the elites left the CP to die on the vine, and lacking a core principal or a galvanizing grievance with which to stir up perpetual umbrage, it could never hope to survive on contributions from its members.
Let’s be honest–the coffee party message was never provocative, it was just a left wing shill to political leftovers who were afraid to take a hard stand to the left or the right or political plants looking to drag the narrative to the left.
Further, (again please refer to Legal Insurrection for the good stuff) the reporting is that while it wanted to act like a grass roots group, it was always and forever a top down propaganda operation lacking in any kind of accountability. It failed to consult with its members, apparently ignored their wishes, and spent their donations without transparency.
This is insanely funny. The lefts response to the Tea Party movement is to manufacture an illegitimate pseudo-moderate astro-turf movement that mimics the same failed style of governance that continues to drive their political popularity into a crevasse, and now they are hand-wringing over it’s demise.
That’s priceless.
