The Tea Party Revolt

I have just come from a stimulating Brookings event on Religion and Tea Party in the 2010 Election. I congratulate my colleagues and the commentators for a most stimulating event (see the Brookings website –links at right hand of blog—for panel and cites to the survey). These comments are done fast to get my reactions out and not to get too bogged down in a scholarly review (which would happen if I were to fill the blog with citations, etc.).

First of all, as an overall reaction, the survey which provided the point of departure was very well done and deserves the high marks it got from the commentators and the audience. (Done by Robert P. Jones and colleague, and available online at publicreligion.org/research) there was perhaps too much excruciatingly close analysis of minor percentage differences on the Tea Partyers vs. the rest of conservatives or the rest of the population. We could have used a bit more analysis. To wit: an interesting debate in the Q&A arose over the findings on p. 10 of the report over the responses to the survey question “no problem if some have more chances in life.” The Tea Party respondents agree with this statement more than religious conservatives and/or the general population. Now the question is not a good one or is not rightly posed. Yes, almost every body would agree that some have more chances in life than others. Life is unfair, as JFK famously once said. It is not, let me just say in my own case, that I have “no problem” if some have better life chances. I regret it of course, but the pertinent question is what you are willing to do about this fact. Do you want government to right every wrong, correct every act of unfairness, and to engage in serious efforts to equalize the life chances of all Americans? Of course not! It is manifestly impossible for government to do such a thing, and when it tries to do so, it gets the nation into a muddle, an expensive and largely futile effort to do things which it cannot do. Moreover it encourages the politicians to overpromise, the curse of modern politics, and to seek to deliver on what they cannot accomplish.
This tendency to overpromise feeds the sense of victimhood which is also so pervasive in our public life (starting in the 70s and 80s). There was a related survey question, namely, respondents were asked to give their reactions to the statement “minorities get too much government attention.” The panelists danced around this one carefully, not wanting to risk much attention to the explosive issue, although, to her, credit, Susan Thistlethwaite of the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Center for American Progress, did venture a comment. As a progressive, she opined that the answers may have reflected a “sense of white privilege” being threatened by he march of our public life. No one rose to the Tea Party’s defense and pointed out that quite possibly the Tea Partyers are just being more straightforward in acknowledging what many Americas feel about affirmative action. To wit: many believe that, fifty years out and more from the Civil Rights Act, we have achieved a reasonable degree of progress with affirmative action programs (more progress is needed, to be sure), but it is now time to phase such efforts out. Affirmative action doesn’t seem to reach the urban underclass (one struggles for a neutral term to describe the phenomenon) in any event where something different is called for. The holdover of the concept in such forms as aid to minority businesses, hiring, access to higher education, and other areas has stirred a great deal of trouble and backlash in the courts and in politics. The question doesn’t (survey questions cannot get at the more subtle points) get at questions of equity in the treatment of minorities other than African Americans, Hispanics, Central Americans, Asians, Middle Easterners. If Asians were to get preferences in college admissions, there would be no non-Asians in the University of California, Berkeley. In such circumstances, should there be affirmative for whites? Should there be class-based affirmative action, a concept that might make a lot of sense and would encompass the poor Blacks but exclude the affluent Blacks.

These are delicate questions for Americans, and not easy ones to address. But the cause is not helped by insinu8ations that anyone who even dares question that minorities might get too much attention from the federal government is a naughty Tea Partyer who must be condemned by all right-thinking (i.e., left-thinking) Americans. Ditto with the question of demographics. Incredulity was expressed by several questioners in the Q&A over the education level, information, and social status of Tea Party identifiers, the implication being that anyone who finds anything remotely respectable about the Tea Party must belong to the “paranoid style” of politics. I was a colleague of Richard Hofstadter’s and loved the guy, but his essay on the paranoid style (inspired by Barry Goldwater) was quite wrong-headed and mischievous. It has been the case for many years (perhaps shifting in recent years) that the most highly educated and most prosperous classes in our society have been conservative and have tended to vote Republican. You may find this fact unattractive but since when have the Haves ever wanted to hand over their fortunes to the Have Nots. The Haves like to give to charity and believe in philanthropy, but they are much less enthusiastic about having the government take from them and give to the poor. O ye Limousine Liberals, don’t pretend that ye want to give away the good things in life that you enjoy!

There was some good commentary on the political implications of the Tea Party movement. No one, however, touched on the possibility of a third party movement resulting for 2012, though Karlyn Bowman of AEI did mention the similarity of Tea Party voters with the Perod voters of 1992. I suspect that a Third Party will not arise for the well known reasons of how difficult for insurgencies to coalesce into formal Third Parties (instead of having their main impact one or the other or both of the major parties). Michael Garson suggested that the Tea Party will be an asset to the Republicans in 2010, but an albatross to party leaders if Republicans do happen to win one or both houses of the Congress. This is a good point and suggestive, but don’t overestimate the Tea Party’s significance. It is always hard to a party in power to hang together.

The point was not made clearly enough that the Tea Party is not leaderless. There is no political movement that is leaderless. The people are not a political actor; they must be mobilized and given articulation by political champion, sustained by media attention, and invigorated by elite activation. All this has happened, but it does not subtract from the underlying reality of what motivates those who identify with the Tea Party (and all Americans to a degree whether they agree or disagree with the Tea Party in general). That most that Americans are tired of politicians who talk too much, promise too much, and of government pretending that it can right all ills. The Tea Party is significant mainly for the reason that it has put its finger on that issue: we are tired of the professional pols that like the political game and are loathe to even hinting at the reality that government can do much to injure us but not much to help beyond some major items. As a Burkian conservative and someone who has lived in New York City for much of his life I know that government is necessary and important for some basic things: maintaining order, keeping the court system running, getting us into (or, preferably, out of wars) while having a muscular defense if we need it, helping the most poor among us but not very much because there have to be incentives to getting out of poverty, regulating the economy (but again not too much), and celebrating and commemorating the mystics of memory stretching from every hearth and hearthstone across this land.

Government needs to do some things but not everything. Here’s a partial list of some things that need doing (by the federal government):
--getting the deficit under control so that we don’t bankrupt the nation;
--extracting us from foreign wars while maintaining a diplomatic presence in the world;
--repealing some parts of the Affordable Health Act while making the rest of it actually workable;
--stabilizing social security by adjusting the cost of living increment formulas;
--passing some immigration reforms (not necessarily a comprehensive bill) that are acceptable broadly to the public by showing some of the cunning and slight of hand we expect from good politicians (I will do a blog on immigration reform in coming weeks);
--coming up with a policy for when and how we will try terror suspects, and then actually trying them.;
-- chase and punish the crap out of all pirates on the seas.
-- create a commission to revise the tax laws .

Here are some things the federal government doesn’t need to do:
-- reform the public schools or further monkey with the educational system;
-- bomb Iran;
-- bring democracy to every nation on earth;
-- get involved in the Sudanese civil war or anything other foreign military adventure we are not involved in now;
-- provide more aid to farmers, workers, producers, consumers, widows, orphans, students, teachers, civil servants, states, localities, or anybody else;
-- reform the electoral laws, campaign finance, labor, or the civil service;
-- provide a Bill of Rights for journalists, air traffic travelers, litigants, or any other group (the Bill of Rights we already have is quite sufficient);
-- pass a new stimulus bill;
-- start a trade war with China;
-- pass a Cap and Trade bill.

I could, as you might imagine, extend this latter list indefinitely. The larger point is that we should be very careful about doing new and more things, and should put great effort and energy into doing well what we are already trying to do. A final comment: it was remarked in the Q&A that the Tea Party adherents had no foreign policy. This is unsurprising since foreign only occasionally sneaks into campaigns (usually only when a war has gotten unpopular and has dragged on for a long time: Americans, like most other peoples, like their wars short and costless). Politics usually means domestic politics. But lurking over everything is that cursed but inexorable law of politics: politicians can commit us to war, and therefore are to be chosen carefully for that reason if for no other. Wars are easier to start than to stop. We have gotten used to an unusual condition: being able to wage war without the civilian population taking much notice until prospects are dire. The Tea Party has little to say on this sort of question because most of us agonize over the issue, and know there are no easy answers. If the Republicans ever return to office, they will confront the agonizing issues of foreign policy and the foreign wars with the same splits that have bedeviled the Democrats. Republicans have learned that they can no longer be the party that supports presidents reflexively on wars, not because they distrust President Obama but because they have cautious and afraid of their own initial reactions. This is not a bad posture for politicians – o ye politicians, take a political Hippocratic oath and do no harm!