Tag: Tea Parties

There is the story and there is reality

Americans, the story goes, are tea-partiers. They want government slashed, taxes cut, have no faith in anything that government does. There is little evidence of this, of course, as Rachel Maddow pointed out last night — recent tea party events have been sparsely attended while the protests in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan in favor of union rights, and others backing other more progressive policies have been much larger.

Efforts like this, from the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, while far from scientific, offer evidence of our support for things like health care and education.

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Tea Party seeks to disinvite voters

It was a chief demand of the Populists, an effort to cut corrupt state legislatures out of the national discussion by having voters elect each state’s senators.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution, as originally drafted, left the selection of each state’s senators to the states’ respective legislatures, an effort designed to cool political passions and lessen the hold that the rabble might have on the federal government.

The states, however, were universally corrupt, beholden to the money interests of the day — to the railroads and big tobacco — and the small farmers in the South and Midwest who made up what became known as the Populist Party found themselves frozen out of the decisionmaking and feeling fleeced.

So the movement began, the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party, calling for monetary reform, regulation of the banks and railroads, and political reform, including the direct election of senators.

While much of the reforms sought by the Populists failed to become law, the party had an impact as the Progressives, a more urban, middle-class movement, altered the way we think about government, instituting an array of regulations and restrictions we now take for granted (bans on child labor, the 40-hour week, health and safety inspections, etc.) and some basic changes in the electoral process — including the 17th amendment, which forced senate candidates onto a popular ballot.

It was a victory for democracy, giving the American people another opportunity to choose for themselves people who are supposed to act on their behalf in matters of war, taxes, etc.

Flashfoward nearly a century and we have today’s most notable populist movement, the rightwing Tea Party, advocating for repeal of the 17th amendment “convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.”

Senate candidates have to raise so much money to run that they become beholden to special interests, party members say. They argue that state legislators would not be as compromised and would choose senators who truly put their state’s needs first.

The argument is an interesting one, if a bit backward looking and anti-democratic. It acknowledges the Founders’ concerns, which included the desire to have a house of elites to offset the people’s house — similar to the arrangement in Great Britain.

To Madison, Hamilton and most of the other authors of the Constitution, allowing states to appoint the Senate was the linchpin of the entire federalist system and the real reason there are two houses of Congress. It may be true that appointed senators, accountable only to state legislators, would never approve of many useful federal mandates designed to put the national interest above local parochialism — including everything from the minimum wage to the new health care reform law.

That in itself should be an argument against repeal (though, I admit, small-government types will not agree), but there is a better one that has nothing to do with political philosophy or ideology. Should New Jersey voters trust the folks who have made such a mess of the state to pick the people who represent us in Washington? Should the people in Albany, who have become national laughingstocks in their dysfunctionality, get to pick which New Yorkers should head south? Would these ethically compromised men and women do a better job than we do?

Do I need to answer?

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We love smaller government — except when we don’t

ABC this morning discussed a poll that shows some difficulties facing Democrats as they head into the November elections. The numbers show a real anger at incumbents, meaning we could see some seats flip, though it still appears unlikely that either house will flip parties.

Something else caught my eye, however. It was this bit of information:

In another vulnerability for the president, Americans by 56-40 percent said they preferred smaller government with fewer services — almost exactly the average the past 26 years — but by a vast 77-15 percent thought Obama prefers the opposite, larger government with more services. That, plus concerns about the deficit, seem ripe for a 2010 campaign theme for the Republican Party.

People say they want/prefer smaller government. As ABC points out, the numbers have remained pretty consistent since the Reagan administration.

This is not news, nor is it particularly enlightening. Americans are inundated with anti-government rhetoric, and not just from Fox News. They get it from the mainstream stations, as well, it seems anticlimactic that Americans would say they dislike government. As always, the definition of small government is left unstated, as is the impact that shrinking government and cutting services would have on the lives they live.

People want smaller government, but what they really mean is they want it for others and not necessarily for themselves.

Middle class taxpayers want welfare curtailed but yell when their mortgage deductions are cut.

We hate regulations, but when the government fails to ensure that hte hamburger bought at the local store is tainted with e coli, we should loudly and demand action.

We want good schools, well-stocked libraries, police departments with enough manpower to keep us safe. We want roads without potholes, bridges that do not collapse, working traffic lights. We want a safety net when we fall on tough times (though we prefer that it not stretch too far or cover too many people we don’t like).

The Tea Party right now lives the contradiction. This motley collection of angry white folks has been protesting the alleged growth of government under the Obama administration, calling the president a socialist, a communist, a fascist, Stalin, Hitler (as if these terms were interchangeable). But think about what they also say: “Keep government out of my Medicare.”

Just as interestingly, we have the Arizona immigration law, which has support from the Tea Partiers (or most of them), even though it expands police power in the state — and they support harsh restrictions on the border, another expansion of police power.

But that expansion is OK, because the people at the target end of the expansion, are the dark ones, the ones who do not speak English.

As I said, Americans want smaller government — but only on our terms.

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Care for some tea?

I think Mark Di Ionno is overplaying the meaning of the tea-party movement — saying the seeds of a new American revolution can be found in it — but I do think these little protests present a challenge to government.

As with the Goldwater campaign of the early 1960s, which essentially was a fringe movement of libertarian conservatives that took over the Republican Party, the tea-partiers appear at first blush to be curiosities. Their calls to arms are taxes, government spending and a visceral dislike of socialism and their early protests have featured some rhetoric that came as close as you can get to crossing the line into xenophobia and racism.

But they are plugging into something bubbling up from the depths of the American psyche, the discontent that has been festering since the economic crash and that has not been adequately addressed by the federal government. (State governments are not equipped, because of their balanced-budget requirements, to deal with much of this mess.)

As much as we on the left like to make fun of the so-called tea-baggers, we have to acknowledge their potential power. Consider the Goldwater campaign. Barry Goldwater lost his presidential race in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Within two years, Ronald Reagan would rise from the ash heaps of the Goldwater movement, using much of his rhetoric to charge into the California state house; Richard Nixon would build his 1968 presidential campaign on the same lingering resentments and the conservative movement would make steady inroads into government, eventually taking it over.

There was a political tone-deafness among liberals at the time, due in part to LBJ’s success. LBJ, however, knew that the liberal moment was passing — he famously predicted the Republican takeover of the South after he signed the Civil Rights Act.

Fast forward to today and we have to ask whether liberals already have grown comfortable with their newfound power, whether they are misreading the election of Barack Obama as something more than a complete disenchantment with the last eight years. Obama made his campaign about change, but what we’ve been witnessing during his first six months in office has been a timid incrementalism, one that has left much of the bankrupt power structure in place.

This is not the kind of change that was envisioned.

There always will be a fringe element on the right, a Goldwater/Reagan faction that views any government action as anti-American. Its power will wax and wane.

If liberals do not act more aggressively, if they cannot explain their approach clearly and transparently, if they do not demonstrate to the disenchanted and discontented middle that they are moving the country in the right direction, then this supposed liberal moment will be a short one and the Goldwater/Reagan trajectory of the second half of the 1960s could play out once more.

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