The Maine Patriots, 300 strong, are revolting. So what else is new? Like most right-wing movements, this one has gone fissiparous:

I was cornered in the parking lot by 10+ people and told that bad things would happen to me if I did not give them the password and hand over Maine Patriots. Therefore, I no longer have control of Maine Patriots.

Bizarrely, there seems to have been a coup in favor of a candidate. As I’ve said since teabaggery began, the right’s problem is that its base is quicksand. They will turn to water and swallow you up. These are the same sort of “patriots” who damage a classroom and call for a new culture war with Islam.

They define the libertarian/authoritarian axis of right-wing confusion. For they hold themselves individually more in authority than the Constitution (they want to amend previous amendments); they believe in prosperity through anarchy; they hold their rights more dear than the rights of any number of people. They do not recognize group rights, and in so doing, take civilization itself for granted.

An invisible hand, they say, will guide us to perfect freedom without government. I’m sure most Maine tea party members will agree a perfect America is one where

the state (is) absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed–“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away”. We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.

Those are the words of Vladimir Lenin referring to Marx and Engels. Only in communism and libertarianism do you find this idea that the state can “wither away” without civilization collapsing on top of it.

The Maine tea party will not go away all at once. I’m certain it will survive in many forms in many places — “evil seeds” that will form the backbone of the right’s long-term survival-strategy. Like a locust, this beast returns every so often to devour our political discourse. “Tea party” floated in the electronic ether for years before the lobbyists saw it and decided to put money into it.

The beast they awoke? A crowd of zombies who, starved of brains, begin to devour one another.