Stanley Kurtz over at the NRO Corner has an interesting thought: is the Left producing its own Tea Party?

The ultimatum delivered last week by California billionaire Tom Steyer to Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate, Rep. Steve Lynch–disavow your support for the Keystone XL pipeline by “high noon” on Friday or face a punishing negative campaign–represents something more serious than the usual Democratic infighting. It signals the tentative emergence of a Tea Party-like leftist grassroots movement that could supercharge the Democratic Party nationally, or rip it apart.

He provides additional evidence of a growing rift in the Democratic party that certainly intrigues your Czar’s mind.

But the Czar disagrees. Although there is clearly a division of liberal opinion over the Keystone XL pipline—evenly divided between “political-economic reality” and “cutting of our noses to spite our faces,” this is not uncharacteristic of liberal thought.

A key difference between conservatives and liberals—one that we often forget in the us-versus-them posturing that’s so easily exploited by folks like ourselves—is that conservatives are fairly uniform in their thinking. Just recently, Jonah Goldberg said that even libertarians and conservatives—which the MSM loves to portray as drifting dangerously apart—are so similar that even their few key differences have enormous overlap. Overall, conservatives (and the Czar lazily dumps libertarians into that mix for all the reasons Jonah provides) are a reasonably uniform bunch.

Sure, we differ on a lot of stuff nobody cares about: drugs, same sex marriage, Dancing With the Stars—all items that are left up to the conscience of the individual rather than a matter of federal regulation—but on the key issues, everybody is pretty well agreed as to what a prudent course of action would be.

Liberals, on the other hand, are composed of basically Everybody Else. Think about that for a second: it isn’t that liberalism is composed of people who take the opposite opinion; liberalism is frequently composed of anyone who takes any contrary opinion. As a result, liberals have a huge group of different and often hilariously competing viewpoints. In fact, the only thing that seems to rally liberals is hatred of conservatives.

How else do you explain that liberalism contains a lot of anti-Zionist Jews as well as Islamists who would be happy seeing the extermination of the same anti-Zionist Jews? Or that liberalism is a beacon to homophobic black preachers as well as the gays they see as anathema? Or that liberalism is home to wealthy Hollywood celebrities who stand next to the leftists that literally want to eat the upper class?

This melting pot of cognitive dissonance is not because of some thematic unity inherent to liberalism. Liberalism remains a bandwagon that invites anyone to jump on it, provided you view yourself injured in some fashion.

The Tea Party, by contrast, is not a rival group within conservatism, either. If memory serves, the Tea Party arose in opposition to the growth of government and its inherent predatory taxation. It does not cause a rift in conservatism except to accuse the Republican establishment of not being aggressive enough.

The Tea Party v. Republican “rift” is purely a political primary strategy; Tea Party voters are supposed to vote for Tea Party candidates over Republican establishment candidates—something the Democrats have been horribly exploiting. Beyond that, Tea Partiers tend to go Republican before they go Democrat.

So while the “rift” on the Right is more of an operational consideration, there’s really nothing but rifts on the Left. A rift over the Keystone XL will amount to little, and will just be one more in a long line.

Consider too that many Liberals are single-issue voters. They get hopping mad over their pet cause and frankly don’t give a crap about anything else: consider the liberal voter who froths over same-sex marriage and repeatedly stabs the (D) candidates on the ballots; he doesn’t seem as concerned that the same candidate who promised him same-sex marriage is the same guy that just cost him and his partner their jobs.

Does Stanley Kurtz believe that a gay, urban black, Jewish social worker is losing sleep over the Keystone XL issue? Or a marijuana-smoking, Marx-reading college professor is going to paint signs over Keystone XL? Or, less stereotypical, even some unemployed day care worker?

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.