Tea Party?

“The Tea Party isn’t extreme,” says Dallas radio talk show host Mark Davis. “It’s overdue.”

I agree in part. The Tea Party supports an overarching idea that actually makes a lot of sense. It argues, at least theoretically, for more careful spending policies. That is not extreme. Most people, even liberals, would probably support that idea. Furthermore, this type of movement energizes people into excited and passionate community participants. These are the details that Mr. Davis wants to emphasize— that and the pure conservatism he claims it represents. Here is where he starts to lose my support.

Now Mr. Davis’ builds the supporting structure of his entire opinion here on the assumption that conservatism is definitively better than anything else. This is significant. I intend to argue this point later here, but for now I would like to point out that he clearly expects his audience to agree with him. He is a conservative radio talk show host in a conservative leaning city. His assumes the readers accept his position. A pity. He has no need to build a compelling argument so he does not.

Unfortunately this type of shoddy, emotional assumption seems to be a reoccurring theme with the Tea Party. Head in sand, fingers in ears, brain off and mouth on overdrive.

The editorial begins by describing Barry Goldwater as the first member of the new conservative movement who, despite the knowledge that he had no chance to beat LBJ, valiantly campaigned to limit the scope of big government with a losing presidential race. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater said. Enamored with this dangerous sort of absolutism, Mr. Davis claims that Goldwater “fired the first shot” in a battle conservatives were to wage for 50 years against the juggernaut of big bad government.

This builds a narrative of conservatism in terms of a sort of political martyrdom. It defines conservatism as vague opposition to government programs with Goldwater as its first martyr. It seems to me that a man who opposed the civil rights bill and refused to censure Joseph McCarthy would be a poor figurehead. I don’t know for certain. Certainly listening to some Tea Party people this seems an apt comparison. They would prefer the tyranny of the masses over the tyranny of the Federal Government requiring everyone to play nice. They would seek out radical Muslims in a sort of neo-McCarthyism.

I don’t want to undermine the conservative idea that a large, unwieldy government is a bad idea. Certainly poorly managed programs potentially undermine society and freedom, but that is different than government programs equaling tyranny. Here he seems to wield conservatism as a holy sword, vague and uncompromising.

Mr. Davis briefly continues the thread of the supposed history of conservatism, following it into the Regan era and on into more recent times. Then he says something sort of odd: “But under Congresses led by both parties, the size, scope and arrogance of government has brought us to today's obvious breaking point. Evidence stretches from ocean to ocean, and its name is the tea party.” Really Mr.Davis? Maybe it’s just a bunch of angry, paranoid people who get their information from disreputable news sources? Again, an example of his willingness to correlate events which probably are much more complicated.

He continues on, discussing Tea Party support as broad and including Independent and Democrat support. This is essentially true, though barely. In point of fact, the voting record of Tea Party supporters suggests only about ¼ are Independents. Only 5% are Democrats.

I could deconstruct this argument, piece by painful piece. However, I think my reader and I would find the process painful and tedious and I am given to hyperbole. So let us instead assume that Mr. Davis is correct in summarizing that the Tea Party is full of good intentions and is a powerful and effective force for conservatism. That is, conservatism defined as the opposition to bloated government.

That’s fine. How then, pray tell, did the Tea Party also become about Anti-Muslim, Anti-Immigration, Anti-Obama, and socialist paranoid issues? If the Tea Party as a movement is just a reaction to big government why did it only appear after Obama came into office? Clearly Mr. Davis is manipulating the narrative to try and make this strange, very American movement into something more pure than is actually the case.

Mr. Davis concludes: “Again the voices saying enough is enough are labeled ‘extreme.’ I suppose everything is relative. Running the country into the ground financially and trampling the Constitution are mainstream; trying to stop those efforts is extreme. Right. I have another adjective for those efforts: overdue.”

Uh, No. Mr. Davis has failed to do anything but assume that the Tea Party is a homogeneous group of warriors opposed to big government. He hasn’t really examined a lot of the talk and assumptions that have come out of this movement. He is willing to claim that the choices of the Democrats and Obama are against the constitution. There is no thought that eight years of bad financial market policy combined with tax breaks and wars have run the country into the ground. It’s poor history at best. It’s willful manipulation of sympathetic readers at worst. I think this article represents the later.

There seems to be a continuation of the conservative echo chamber here. The implication, to me, is that conservative ideas are accepted on faith. From the Tea Party perspective (apparently) there is no reason to examine real issues because people like Mr. Davis already know the answers. The political reality is that we probably can’t expect that much from the Tea Party other than more of the same. Only the same has become more thoughtless. More angry. This is sad. These efforts are overdue. It’s sad to see them get derailed so soon.