The Tea Party was created for a lot of reasons. The initial astroturfing was aimed at fiscal-responsibility people, but that’s a moderate position, and the corporate wing of the GOP wants low taxes for rich people and high military spending. So the fiscal responsibility people got shoved into the corner with the crazy right-wing haters, which kept them safely away from any actual policy-making while giving the haters some semblance of legitimacy. And the crazy people could do vicious attacks on any Democrat around without the mud sticking to the corporate wing, who could say “oh, no, that’s just those Tea Party crazies, not us!”
The party machine doesn’t fundamentally care about religion or misogyny or racism or gays, but was willing to let the Tea Party use them as tools to get the crazies to be politically active.
Climate change is a much bigger issue for them - the coal and oil businesses really don’t want Congress making policy against carbon emissions. Evolution Denialism was a way to attract a voting block; Climate Change Denialism is a core message from the party’s Corporate Sponsors, and the crazy people are happy to be convinced about it because they don’t care.
Immigration was more of a policy problem; the corporations want cheap labor, but the crazies were politically useful and that was something they were crazy about; that and the War on Women are starting to seriously cost them.
The corporate wing is somewhat against debt, especially in the long term, but they’re ok with it in the short term, and the Tea Party was started in 2008, when Bush was getting termed out and they figured they could blame it on the incoming Democrats.
Somewhat like that, but it’s the US system, where primary elections get decided by whatever voters show up, not by the party political machine, so it’s not as unthinkable (which is the main point of having primary elections instead of party-list systems.) And Cantor’s position is rather lower than Milliband’s - he’s the current party leader in the House, but he’s not Speaker of the House, and US political party machines are much less aligned with the Congress than parliamentary-country political machines are with their MPs.
Also, while it will be remembered for a while, the primary winner has a good chance of winning here, unlike in 2010’s election in Delaware where the Tea Party candidate shocked everyone by beating the popular moderate ex-governor in the primary and losing badly in the general election.
Davide405, sounds like you find religious people to be scary, but Princeton Theological Seminary isn’t a right-wing religious establishment. It’s not quite as liberal as, say, Harvard, but it’s the kind of place where people study to be Presbyterian ministers or research the writings of Karl Barth on ethics, not the kind of place for studying the ignition temperatures of different kinds of heathens and heretics.
It’s not that I find religious people, per se, to be scary. But out of the whole of the profile of a man who has a very good chance to be the next elected representative from that Texas district, the fact he is a seminary graduate is the part I find most disturbing.
Make no mistake, some religious people are scary. Violent, fundamentalist extremists of any religion make very poor neighbors.
However, I accept your description of Princeton Theological Seminary as hardly being a bastion of right-wing nut jobs, and that does ease my mind a bit.
That was a brilliant line 
and I hereby request permission to use it myself, should the opportunity arise.
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