Tension between libertarian-leaning tea partiers and the GOP’s social conservative base was probably inevitable, but the most interesting part of the Politico’s story on a split within the movement is a disagreement over the protesters’ tone: [Read more →]

A reader writes:

Erik, as someone who lives in the Mighty Whitey Elite NY-DC Corridor, but who comes from Tea Party America, and who has lots of friends and relatives highly sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, I want to say that I think you and Freddie are both right, though your point in defense of the Tea Partiers is a more difficult one for people who live in your (our) social and professional milieu to grasp.

Like Freddie, and I think also like you, I don’t have much time for the Tea Partiers. Their protests are incoherent. Whether they realize it or not, they are setting themselves up as tools of the Republican Party (I’m a registered Republican, by the way, though a deeply disaffected one). In conversations with these people, I am impressed, and not in a good way, by how totally unrealistic they are about the problems facing our country, and the possible solutions. They think Sarah Palin is untouchable, and when you actually try to talk to them about what she stands for, they can’t do it. "Palin good, anti-Palins bad!" is the response I get. They hate "Washington" (and who could blame them for that?), and they hate "big government," but as far as I can tell, their rage is inchoate — which is to say, ultimately pointless, though it can do a lot of damage before it plays itself out. As a conservative who thinks the GOP is pathetic and bereft of ideas, I find the Tea Party movement frightening, when it’s not silly. Strange that a movement can be both ridiculous and unnerving, but that’s how I see them. I think Freddie is right to point out that there’s a lot of bad, crazy stuff going on with those people. To me, the worst thing I’ve seen and heard from them is flat-out racist commentary about President Obama.

But when I read or hear people like Freddie portray these people as nothing more than whiny babies who have lost their "privilege" and who can’t deal with it, I instantly sympathize with them, for reasons you’ve articulated. Look, I know these people. I grew up with them. I am related to them. For all their flaws, I can say confidently that they are in most respects the backbone of this country. They live their own lives, work hard, treat people fairly, and expect to be treated fairly in return. They’re patriotic and proud of what they have, which is too often not a hell of a lot (you don’t see many upper middle class or wealthy people identifying with this movement). It’s easy for people like Freddie to hate on them, not only because some of them make it easy with bigoted statements, but also because they are The Other, and are pleased to identify themselves in opposition to people like Freddie. We are constantly admonished by the media to be understanding and accepting of "diversity" among the various peoples of America, but these white working class and middle class people are the only ones it’s okay to define only by their flaws. I’ve struggled with the same thing many educated Southerners of the post-civil rights generation have: how is it that people who can be so good, so deeply kind and selfless and brave, can be so completely blind and ugly on the question of race? That is, thank God, less of an issue today than it was 20 years ago; times change, and so do people. But the fact is, there are few people, or peoples, who are all good or all bad, and learning to see the people I come from in Tea Party America as fundamentally good despite their (often nasty) biases has been for me a moral education. If you were stranded on the side of the road in rural Alabama, your best friend is likely to be a redneck churchgoing Tea Partier who would come out in the middle of the night to rescue you, and either put you up for the evening or buy you a hotel room. It might not make sense, but I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a thousand times.

The tragedy of these people — hell, my people — is that they don’t grasp how the Republican Party and Fox News exploit them. Did they benefit from the depredations of Wall Street? Hell no! The Republicans and the Democrats both allowed that to happen. In my view, the Republicans have made an art of appeasing the Tea Party types (before they were called that), while really pushing hard for the interests of Wall Street. And the Democrats, despite their pretenses otherwise, consider these white people to be an embarrassment at best, but more often than not a menace. Who is really for them? Nobody, not really. No wonder they’re angry, and confused. I dearly wish they had real leadership, and weren’t taken in by that clown Glenn Beck, that cynic Dick Armey, and that nitwit Sarah Palin. Their grievances are real, and legitimate. But, as Freddie understands, they have chosen whom they’ve chosen, and however sympathetic I am to their plight, I cannot entirely blame people for scorning them for the way they have chosen to express those grievances.

It’s a real mess. In my state’s Republican primary this year, I’ll probably have to choose between a party hack or a Tea Party loon. I don’t know how I’ll vote, if I vote at all. Choices on the Democratic side seem as bad or worse. We’re in a bad fix in this country.

I agree with pretty much all of this.  I still think that the tea party members are more diverse than we give them credit for, and not all of them are as Utopian in their vision of a small-government America as the most vocal ones, but I still see no political home there, any more than in the GOP (let alone the Democrats). 

I’m just going to go start my own political non-movement.  Let’s call it Beat Conservatism.  We’ll all be bums and rail against the centralization of power, against war, against modernity and all that jazz.  We won’t be pissed off all the time, we’ll write poetry.  We won’t rally or make signs or go on TV or run candidates – we’ll just embrace our ineffectualness.  The great irony of true conservatism, if I may call it that, is that at its heart is a distrust of power.  So to really embrace it you must give it up, let go of power, let go of political ambition.  Become political pacifists.  Embrace the culture and not the war.  That’s what my non-movement will be about.  (P.S. if anyone has any literature or references on the end-days of Jack Kerouac I’d appreciate  hearing about it.  He was a life-long Republican, and toward the end of his life re-embraced Catholicism.  Quite a fascinating, but terribly sad man and story.)

Despite some quibbles with his characterization of the modern Left, I hope Dan Riehl is very much on the right track in arguing that the old movement conservative establishment is no longer capable of holding the Right together, and that the future of the Right lies with the Tea Parties, and in particular with the more libertarian element of the Tea Parties.  [Read more →]

Like Allahpundit - and, surprisingly to me, for the same reasons - I have no idea whatsoever what the newly-released Mount Vernon Statement is supposed to accomplish.  It amounts to a statement that the old Three-Legged Stool remains coherent and relevant.  Why?  Because they said so, that’s why.  There are no details, no attempt to resolve the conflicting interests of social conservatives, economic conservatives, hawks, and libertarians.  Just a blanket statement that somehow these groups all have the exact same interests, and all agree with a very generalized vision of the Constitution.  As Allahpundit points out, “the principles here are so broad as to be almost meaningless,” and noting further that the Statement doesn’t even attempt to provide a framework for bridging the gap between libertarians/paleocons and neo-conservatives on foreign policy (see Larison for a more fully developed argument on this point), nor does it provide any guidance as to how one would determine whether a particular policy fits within the notion of “Constitutional conservatism.” 

Compare this Mount Vernon statement, drafted by the old lions of movement conservatism, with the Tea Partiers’ proposed “Contract From America,” which doesn’t attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable but instead tries to keep a tight focus on fiscal and economic issues, and you get the feeling that the old school movement conservative leaders have ceased to be relevant in any meaningful way.

There are many things wrong with what James is trying to say in this post.  I will try to tackle a few of them.  The meat of the post, which is also the part most riddled with odd suppositions and strangely drawn conclusions, is as follows:

The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around, help make this clear. Take taxes. When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it. The evil of taxes is not primarily economic but political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor. The GOP is supposed to keep this kind of tyranny at bay, and when it comes near, the GOP is supposed to ward it off.

It’s in this regard that, over the past ten years, the GOP has failed. The trouble with RINOs is that, in their liberalism, they are often either blind to the threat of tyranny or they do not really see it as a problem. This is not because they ‘fail to understand the nature’ of tyranny. Tyrannical regimes can rule over dynamic, exciting societies, over huge numbers of people full of promise and purpose. They can focus resources on big challenges and execute amazing feats of efficiency and publicity. Just ask the growing number of American commentators suffering from China envy.

Three things are mistaken here.

First, that “taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it” strikes me as a very odd thing to assert n the context of the past decade.  While taxes may indeed aggrandize the state, how James can reach this conclusion after a period in which tax rates have been at historical lows is beyond me.  If anything, the past decade has revealed the state’s capacity to endlessly borrow in order to pay for the spending that Republicans and Democrats alike cannot seem to cut back.

And while taxes can indeed be corrosive to liberty and used to coerce citizens and distort the natural economy and a whole host of other abuses, they can also be used for legitimate purposes – though no two people can agree on what those purposes may be.  I assume James approves of our tax dollars going to our national defense, for instance, but perhaps not toward national healthcare.  Calling this tyranny without explaining why it is tyranny is mostly unsatisfying, especially coming from someone who can certainly think past such trite assertions. [Read more →]

It is impossible to understand politics in the United States over the last 12 months without some in-depth discussion of the impact of the Tea Party movement.  Over the course of the last several days, I had the good fortune to engage in a dialogue with Stephen Gordon about a wide range of Tea Party-related topics, including what the Tea Party movements are about, where they’re going, what their influence has been and will be, and whether there is the possibility of a right-left alliance under the Tea Party umbrella.  There are, frankly, few people as qualified as Gordon to discuss these topics, as he’s been partying with tea since long before it was cool, having helped organize a successful state-level Tea Party in Alabama as early as 2003.  Gordon has also been heavily involved in libertarian politics for a number of years, including acting as Communications Director for Michael Badnarik’s 2004 campaign, and e-Campaign manager for Bob Barr’s 2008 campaign.  Recently, he’s appeared several times on the Rachel Maddow Show, and contributes to several well-regarded blogs, including the Liberty Papers, the Next Right, and Examiner.com.  He is now the Director of Media Relations for the political consulting firm Forward Focus Media.

MT: It’s quite clear that the Tea Party movement is primarily a grassroots-based movement without any clear leaders.  Moreover, although the Tea Party movement seems to be primarily focused on government spending, there have been numerous documented Tea Party-affiliated protests focusing on anything from the Democratic health care reform bills to illegal immigration.  Is there any kind of coordination of message that takes place within the movement, and if not, what would you say is the common theme that runs through all of the Tea Party organizations?

SG: This is a point I tried to make the other night on Rachel Maddow’s show.  If there had been enough time to elaborate, I would have stated because these are grassroots operations led in many places by people with no political experience, they are ripe for takeovers by established political organizations.  Obviously, organizations taking over elements of the movement have their own agendas. What I see most often is an attempt to guide the Tea Party movement to do what they initially opposed: re-electing politics-as-normal big-government Republicans.

 To me, healthcare is a very relevant topic for Tea Parties.  Immigration, abortion, foreign policy or even reform of marijuana laws, not so much.  I’ve been vocal about this in the past.  

Because of the nature of the movement, top-down coordination of the message can’t be planned by Karl Rove.  This also means that each Tea Party event or organization will have a slightly different flavor.  If I was in charge of the movement, my message would be one of fiscal responsibility. This encompasses deficit spending, corporate bailouts, stimulus packages, the current health care legislation, etc.  To a great degree, this is also the message of my Tea Party groups I’ve encountered. This, in my opinion, is a good thing.

MT: How do the Tea Parties overcome this problem of co-option, which seems to infect grassroots movements of all political stripes?  Is some sort of organized – and independent – top-down leadership eventually going to be necessary, or can the Tea Parties maintain their momentum without maintaining a narrow focus on fiscal issues?

SG: I’d offer any Tea Party organization the same general advice. First of all, stick to a single or narrow range of issues.  Every time a new, and especially an unrelated, issue is introduced the movement will lose supporters. Second, develop organic lists. Make sure you obtain e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. at every event and from as many website visits as possible. Third, don’t let them take you over but make them come to you. Alabama Tea Party activists just held a gubernatorial debate and straw poll and their favorite candidate was made apparent. Had that particular movement been co-opted, I’m sure the result would have been different. 

While the laws  vary by location, if any local movement becomes large or influential enough, state and federal laws are eventually going to force some legal organizational entity to be formed. This will require a bit more top-down approach in some regard, but hopefully the Tea Party groups will be very mindful of the grassroots activists who made their organizations possible in the first place.

MT:Changing gears slightly, many commentators certainly have questioned where the Tea Partiers’ anger was during the Bush Administration’s spending orgies, not to mention the bank bailouts.  This isn’t to say that all of the Tea Partiers can be accused of suddenly discovering their passions when the Democrats took over in Washington – obviously, libertarians like you and your old boss Bob Barr, not to mention Ron Paul’s legions, have been banging this drum for a long while.  But why has the rise of the Tea Parties seemingly coincided with the Democrats – and President Obama - obtaining overwhelming power in Washington? [Read more →]

“In short, liberals and conservatives refuse to see the areas in which they have common ground because far too often they simply cannot get past the cultural markers that prevent them from even listening to the substance of what their cultural opposites are saying.” ~ Mark Thompson

In this post Mark is responding to what he sees as Jamelle’s assertion that the “hidden” welfare state is bad, whereas the “visible” welfare state is good.  Essentially Mark is asserting that liberals attempt to build the visible welfare state on top of the hidden welfare state, whereas libertarians and conservatives try to make the hidden welfare state smaller and more visible.

Now, I think this is not really what Jamelle was saying.  I think Jamelle was saying that we have a welfare state and that many Americans both appreciate the services that this state provides while at the same time not really realizing that it’s a welfare state providing them – the whole “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” thing.  He’s saying that Americans exist in an illusion of free markets and bootstraps while in reality we have a very large state apparatus which provides safety nets, subsidies, and numerous other benefits to countless people and businesses.  What he’d like to do is make that more obvious so that people appreciated it more and then, in turn, supported a further expansion of the welfare state once they realized what a good thing it, in fact, was.  Contra Jamelle, conservatives and libertarians would like to draw down the welfare state because they see it – whether it is visible or hidden – as an encroachment upon liberties, upon the economy, and upon prosperity, job growth, and so forth.  These two goals are entirely at odds.

So I don’t think that it is simply a cultural barrier which prevents liberals and libertarians/conservatives from working together.  I think it is a fundamental political difference in core beliefs about the size and scope of the welfare state which separates the two groups.

But it’s also the culture.  After all, politics is secondary to culture.  Cultural beliefs and norms and expectations drive politics – not the other way around. While political shifts can lead to shifts in culture, this is usually unintentional. Mark is certainly correct that it is the cultural divide more than anything which keeps liberals and conservatives from forming a united front, but then again that isn’t the whole story.  I think some groups of conservatives or libertarians could align quite nicely with specific elements of the left.  We’ve seen such an alliance in economics, actually, with the stronger elements of both the right and the left embracing free trade.  But the Tea Party right and the progressive anti-corporate, anti-free-trade left have much less of a chance at uniting because of the vast, gaping cultural divide between the two sides.

Can you honestly see Glenn Beck and Michael Moore coming together on many issues?  Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich may both be united in their opposition to many more mainstream bills and practices in Congress, but when it comes to their political goals the two are – save perhaps on foreign policy – complete opposites.  Their ultimate goals may be similar – a more honest government, working harder for the people and not for the elites and the corporations – but Kucinich and the progressives believe this can be done with a bigger state and smaller private sector, whereas Paul believes that the state is at the heart of the issue and should be dismantled as much as possible.

I’m very drawn to Mark’s liberaltarian cause, and to the idea of the sides working together in this way.  I’m just perhaps too cynical to believe in it.  I myself am rather a mixed bag and can find common cause with both elements.  But most people in these groups are not mixed bags. They’re die-hard partisans.  And they don’t like each other much, or at least what the other stands for and believes in – especially culturally, but politically too.

Jane Hamsher has been taking a lot of flak in recent days for coming out against the Senate health care reform bill as well as for suggesting that “both the [progressive opponents] and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill” and that the ”painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.”  Although not actively opposing the final Senate bill, Glenn Greenwald offered similar sentiments about the common ground between the Tea Partiers and the far left, noting:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing:  a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.  Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.  It’s true that the people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their grievances about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it’s dependent upon and supportive of that corporatist model.  That’s why they turn to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist anger?

Hamsher then followed through on her assertions by agreeing to take her case to Fox News, for which she was criticized as being “naive.” Finally, today we learn that she has teamed up with none other than Grover Norquist to call for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation due to his actions with respect to Fannie and Freddie.  The criticisms of Hamsher and to a lesser extent Greenwald, have been echoed by several of my fellow Gents here at the League. 

Underlying these criticisms of Hamsher seems to be an assumption that: 1. From a liberal perspective, it is inarguable that the Senate bill at least makes things better; 2.  Hamsher is insane for finding common ground with Tea Partiers in opposition to bailouts that were sold as necessary to prevent a Great Depression; and 3. Hamsher is insane for thinking the Tea Partiers have any actual common ground with her, and that they may actually have similar values to her. 

The first two of these criticisms, however, demonstrate precisely why Hamsher and Greenwald are ultimately correct about the common ground with the Tea Partiers.  Specifically, these criticisms assume that “the experts” are always right, and that the average voter is unqualified to assess the normative merits of a particular government action.  So, the message is sent that progressives like Hamsher should STFU since Paul Krugman thinks that the bill, while imperfect, is at least an improvement from the status quo.  Similarly, on the bailouts, Hamsher (as well as, I assume, all the Dem legislators that voted against them last year) should STFU and support them because the experts say things would have been really, really bad without them [NOTE: I am not offering an opinion here as to my thoughts on TARP].  In each case, Hamsher is expected to weigh the acknowledged normative costs less than the claimed normative costs because, well, she’s neither an expert nor an insider; she’s dismissed as being unrealistic and unserious merely for assigning different moral weight to the acknowledged normative costs from the experts.  Unfortunately, last I checked, being an expert economist or scientist doesn’t give one authority to tell people how to make moral calculations. 

[Read more →]

I can see where Jane Hamsher’s tea-party/populist left united front thing could seem appealing as a movement against something (the no-good politicians in Congress and their corporate special-interest shenanigans).   [Read more →]

Scott: So, ’tis the season where we annually get into the inimitable argument over whether people should be saying, “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, whether there ought to be school plays involving the birth of the baby Jesus or not, and where everyone gets a little twitchy from hearing the same old songs mind numbingly lilting out of every speaker in ear shot. It’s time for the War on Christmas/Pluralism — depending on your point of view.

As a long defunct Christian, I’ve never really understood why the arguably most dominant religious pocket on the entire continent gets so bent out of shape over the idea that some folks would like to not feel pressured or forced into participating in a holiday that their religion just doesn’t recognize. I mean, as one friend once said to me, “We swim in a sea of Christianity here in North America.” So why the big brouhaha over some folks pushing back and saying, “You know, that’s not my bag. Decorate your home however you like, but don’t make me sit through your religious rituals. I don’t make you sit through mine!”

Am I missing something here?

Erik: If you haven’t read Julian Sanchez on the “politics of ressentiment” then you should. I think the idea of a “war on Christmas” is largely grown out of this sense of ressentiment (which also animates much of what drives the conservative base in the larger cultural/political wars. [Read more →]

A lot of the reaction to my conservapedia piece falls along the lines that you would expect – essentially that I’m painting with too broad a brush.  I probably was in that post.  Obviously a lot of conservatives are thoughtful, independent-thinking, and honest people.  It’s primarily, therefore, a reaction to the conservative leadership that leads me to write posts like that one.  To the movers and shakers on the quasi-populist right.

What I think we’re seeing and have been seeing now for some time is the heating up of an internal war within the GOP and the broader conservative movement, which includes the Tea Parties and other grassroots efforts that may or may not be directly affiliated with the Republican Party.  This was bound to happen after the McCain loss.  It gave the real right-wingers in the party (and outside of it) a chance to blame the moderates for the loss, and it gave the GOP insiders a chance to settle old scores.  I’m not at all sure that the factions here are really “moderates vs conservatives” so much as a certain brand of right-winger vs. another.

I’m not really entirely sure of Sean Scallion’s break down of the sides involved as Conservative Inc. vs. the establishment.  I think that they overlap far too much, and I think that it is a certain faction within the establishment that is also at the heart of the Tea Parties, warring against other factions within the establishment.  In other words, the grassroots base is not its own entity but rather part of a larger faction.

Nor is it simply social conservatives vs. fiscal conservatives, or neoconservatives vs. realists, or neoconservatives vs. social conservatives.  The factions at play here are not the old divisions, and the old rules don’t apply.  People like David Frum are pushed to the margins for entirely different reasons than people like Daniel Larison. [Read more →]

This interview with Andy Schlafly [below] of conservapedia.com is hard to watch.  It’s almost embarrassing.  I think Colbert is at his best for most of the exchange, and the zinger about creating his own reality is marvelous.  Schlafly really is the ultimate self-parodic conservative, and I’m not just saying that because he has one of the most annoying laughs in the history of television.  He says, and I shit you not, that most of Jesus’ parables were lessons in free market economics. I really am spoiled reading the conservative writers that I do read at the Scene and the Porch and Pomocon and the other little pockets of intellectual conservatism remaining.

But really.  Good grief.  I’ve heard of conservapedia but I never realized how utterly inane the project really was.  Of all the silly things on the internet, this one is beginning to take shape as a future hall-of-famer. That’s the magnificent thing about the internet – there’s always room for one more elegant disaster.

Let’s see – here’s the opening paragraph in the entry on evolution: [Read more →]