As I’ve said before on this blog, Tea Party supporters, angry at that great enigmatic something, are attempting to hit a moving target, or perhaps, many moving targets, from taxes to heath care to immigration to “socialist” programs, etc., with no coherent or cogent plan of attack, no leader, no platform, no banner. Unless, of course, that banner is “Don’t Tread On Me,” and well, we know how silly that is.
Michael Kinsley in his recent column for The Atlantic, disputed a March 4 essay by David Brooks comparing the current Tea Party movement to that of the 1960s-era anti-Vietnam demonstrations and rallies. As Brooks said:
There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.
But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor.
… But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.
Kinsley noted three distinct differences, however. First, statistics have shown that the Tea Party crowd is composed of a majority of middle class, older folks, whereas 1960s protesters were, by and large, young people (Some, interestingly, may have participated in both). Second, as noted above, Tea Partiers don’t have one prevailing and acute grievance as did people in the 1960s with their arguments against the war. Kinsley conceded that, perhaps, health care was the Tea Party cause, but noted:
… even for devoted TPPs, stripping health insurance away from people who’ve just gotten it is unlikely to summon the same passions that the activists of the 1960s brought to stopping a misguided war. Not only do TPPs not have one big issue like Vietnam—they disagree about many of their smaller issues. What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal.
Third, and perhaps, most prescient, 1960s protesters’ ultimate goals were not inward-looking, but outward, against an ill-conceived war, racism and other social ills of the day. According to Kinsley,
… although the 1960s featured plenty of self-indulgence, this wasn’t their essence. Their essence was selfless and idealistic: stopping the war; ending racism; eradicating poverty. These goals and some of the methods for achieving them may have been childishly romantic or even entirely wrongheaded, but they were about making the world a better place. The Tea Party movement’s goals, when stated specifically, are mostly self-interested.
And here, I want to posit a theory. Preachers have bemoaned for centuries how many in their flocks will often put on the cloak of faith in hard times. Personal disaster or “trials” bring a person ever closer to God and increase, not lessen faith, right? While in good times, people (Here, I mean among all those who say they believe. I understand that many among us stay devout all the time in good or bad. Nonetheless, preachers everywhere see the same inconsistency in good versus bad times) of professed faith much readily coast through life, praying if they feel like it, perhaps throwing up an offering of thanksgiving now and then.
But here is the crux: the same tendency often holds true for government, and Kinsley touched on this incongruency in the Tea Party doctrine when he mentioned the right-wing axiom of personal responsibility:
“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself (Italics mine). But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control.
I could make a further claim: that government can be, in this case, analogous with a worshipped deity. Some, indeed, clamber to God in times of tragedy but in the boom years, thoughts to pray, etc., more easily slip folks’ minds. Thus, the constant requirement of belabored preachers everywhere to keep the necessity of prayer and Bible reading in the forefront of the layman’s mind.
And so it is with government. Millions line up at Tea Party rallies to protest how their freedoms are being infringed upon and how they want less intervention and more control of their lives. This is the essence of free will (Although, from the Christian view, humans never had free will to begin with, since we were, as Fulke Greville memorably put it: “Created sick — Commanded to be well”). But when one of the Tea Party’s number becomes stricken with some debilitating illness or major injury, well, that person is first in line at the Medicaid office to get their benefits, and I would even guess, first on their knees as well.