A few days ago I stuck up a couple of postings here pertaining to the forthcoming US Presidential election, one specifically about Paul Ryan, and the other about, more generally, whether it makes sense to worry about which particular lizard is elected Lizard King. Does the fact that the wrong lizard might get in really signify?
My own opinion is that it all depends on the Tea Party, people who I want to believe to be good people with good ideas.
I would like the Tea Party to make a big and visibly decisive difference to America electing the least worst lizard to be Lizard King. That would mean that they would then really count for something. But what I would really like would be for the Tea Party then to use the clout they thus amass to subject the new Lizard King to political pressures such that, whatever his personal inclinations or past habits, the new Lizard King finds himself obliged to do Tea Party things. By which I mean run the US government less like a sting-the-suckers-for-all-they-have crime syndicate.
To put all that another way, I really want to believe that this (by David Kirby and Emily Ekins for the Cato Institute) is true:
Many people on the left still dismiss the tea party as the same old religious right, but the evidence says they are wrong. The tea party has strong libertarian roots and is a functionally libertarian influence on the Republican Party.
Compiling data from local and national polls, as well as dozens of original interviews with tea party members and leaders, we find that the tea party is united on economic issues, but split on the social issues it tends to avoid. Roughly half the tea party is socially conservative, half libertarian – or, fiscally conservative, but socially moderate to liberal.
Libertarians led the way for the tea party. Starting in early 2008 through early 2009, we find that libertarians were more than twice as “angry” with the Republican Party, more pessimistic about the economy and deficit since 2001, and more frustrated that people like them cannot affect government than were conservatives. Libertarians, including young people who supported Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, provided much of the early energy for the tea party and spread the word through social media.
Understanding the tea party’s strong libertarian roots helps explain how the tea party movement has become a functionally libertarian influence on the Republican Party. Most tea partiers have focused on fiscal, not social, issues – cutting spending, ending bailouts, reducing debt, and reforming taxes and entitlements – rather than discussing abortion or gay marriage. Even social conservatives and evangelicals within the tea party act like libertarians.
That’s as far as I’ve so far read. There’s another fifty or more pages.
Meanwhile … I wish.
GLF: I think it depends where you are. When I was Tea Party Patriots Coordinator for Maine I did an 8000 mile/26 day speaking tour of the US (driven). I spoke to hundreds of tea party types all over the country. And their range of views equaled the range of the views on the “right” in the US.
In fact I wrote a piece on this subject a while ago for The Examiner.
Brian:
I share your aspirations for the Tea Party. But I worry about it’s resemblance to a failed political movement in Canada.
In the late 80s, a new political party formed in Canada called the Reform Party. It’s objectives in the early days were clear: reform of the federal Parliament along several fairly clearly defined paths (elected senators, etc.). However, the party formed in a part of Canada that had traditionally been strongly conservative (upper case and lowercase “c”), and some of the founders had historical ties to previous, more clearly conservative movements and parties. Also, the major media in Canada was generally not on board with the proposals that the Reform Party was promoting. So, pretty much from the get-go, it was painted as a “radical right wing” movement in the media.
To make a long story short, the Reform Party did gradually become more of a mainstream conservative party, and eventually merged with the existing Progressive Conservative Party to form the present-day Conservative Party of Canada. Along the way, the momentum toward reform of Parliament was completely lost, and few of the Reform Party’s original objectives ended up being addressed in any serious way.
I suspect a couple of things happened that derailed the Reform Party’s movement. One was that they weren’t able to convince enough Canadians of the importance of the reforms they proposed to succeed, politically, with those reforms at the center of their focus. Particularly Canadians who might have lost some political influence as a result of those reforms. Another was that the constant portraying of the party as a right-wing party seemed, over time, to attract a disproportionate number of conservatives to the party so that, over time, the centroid of opinion within the party did become noticeably more conservative.
While there are some obvious differences between the history of the Reform Party in Canada and the more recent history of the Tea Party movement in the U.S., there are some obvious parallels, too. The Tea Party movement is, pretty successfully, being portrayed in the mainstream media as a “radical right wing” movement. And I suspect that will, over time, tend to attract more genuinely conservative people to the movement. Also, while the ostensible goals of the Tea Party seem of obvious importance to many people, it is still a narrow field of interest from the perspective of most voters. If the Tea Party were an actual party it would be under a lot of pressure to develop a more comprehensive platform, which would expose the differences of opinion within the party and force it to become more easily categorizable (and therefore more easily opposable).
I’m sure that a large part of the Tea Party’s success is due to not being an actual party, and that may save it from the fate of the Reform Party. But I do worry about the similarities.
There is a similar kind of tension between social conservatives and economic libertarians in UKIP, of course.
One thing the tea partiers have learned to deal with is people like the first commenter attacking them.
I’ve been to a few tea parties and no, we don’t hate teh gays. We hate unresponsive politicians spending our grandchildren’s money to buy votes.
There are no peripheral issues. Do some tea partiers hate gays? Yup. Are some gay? Yup. Do most not care one way or another? That’s how I’d bet.
The Tea Party is not monolithic, but what we’ve been doing is working on getting lower-level people elected.
The first year or so you could tell that all the different tea parties thought they could get the gov’t and political parties to listen. They didn’t, so the tactics changed.
Sitting senators have lost primaries, ditto congresscritters.
We’re working on the bottom up, changing the culture and trying to get rid of career politicians.
We’ve been mostly working with the GOP because they at least pretend to espouse fiscal conservatism and also because what we believe goes against the whole Bread and Circuses point of the Democratic party.
I would suggest that Ryan is Romney’s attempt to get us to support him, ditto the medicare argument going on right now.
That’s a win in my book.
I was active at a high level in the San Antonio Tea Party in 2009 and 2010, and although a large portion of the Tea Partiers I worked with did have a social conservative and evangelical background, there was a substantial libertarian element. We pretty much agreed early on, that having any sort of policy about hot-button issues like abortion and same-sex marriage were a distraction – they were secondary or even tertiary issues. The big three, and important over everything else was fiscal responsibility, strict adherence to the Constitution, and free markets. (Real free markets, not crony capitalism, where the political elite picks the winners.)
Everything else after those three things was tabled for when the big three problems were dealt with.
Is the Tea Party libertarian? Mostly. Is the Republican Party more libertarian as a result of it? Most certainly.
And that has made all the difference.
So far, it certainly seems that the individuals active in the Tea Party movements (they vary in composition) are Good People; largely allied
Bad Ideas, as much or moreso than pressing for good ideas, which are more diverse by interests.
But, that resistance, beginning as it did, and for the reasons it did, may be a New Awakening.”
I was proud to have been called by Newsweek in 2009 “the leader of libertarian insurgency in the tea party movement”. Obviously not accurate because the tea party movement does not really have “leaders”. However I banded together with others who felt the same way in the early days of the Tea Party Patriots to keep it away from the social issues and to stick with the fiscal ones. So enraged were some that they left and formed Patriots for Christ an organization that genuinely believes the only “true” Patriots are Christians.
My part of the world is something of a nexus of Tea Party activism. I’m not involved, myself. This area has always been bedrock Republican.
I see libertarian-izing influences at play around here and some of those at least must be reflective of, or connective to, the growth of the Tea Party.
Illustrate by example, as the tutors used to say.
General contempt for the wilder inanities of the Federal government, Federal spending and Federal snooping. Census refusal was epidemic in 2010, with all sorts of stories in the local media of all-time low compliance rates and census takers being told to go pound sand. The local pezzonovantes have been trying to drum up support for a Federally-funded commuter-rail connection between (one small town) and (a slightly larger town) – the local reaction has been overwhelmingly one of derision for the waste of funds on a plan that makes no economic sense. ‘But we’ll fund it with Federal dollars!’, one local booster famously cried. ‘No such thing as Federal dollars’, he was famously schooled. Same went for a completely-unnecessary freeway intersection, which would have fatuously connected the freeway with a dirt road.
I’m hearing from my LE friends that trivial cases of personal-use possession have been essentially de-criminalized because the prosecutor is sick and tired of being beaten up over his budget and how much of it gets used on this penny-ante stuff. The local DDA, which was notorious for its paternalistic master-planning of downtown, got taken over in a coup-de-main and now all of a sudden, you can get a liquor license or a parade permit for downtown without having to jump through months of bureaucratic hoops and paying thousands of $$$.
(most inane example – when the US Army band played a concert in the downtown bandshell, the city/DDA conditioned its permit on the funding of 8 police officers (at time-and-a -half) to keep order. You know how that oompah music can lead to riots and mayhem).
The local CPL board has been completely revamped – they used to adhere to the exact black-letter of the Michigan CPL law, but they didn’t like it and you could tell. Now they’ve done a complete about-face – I won’t say it’s a pleasure to renew your CPL, but at least they don’t enforce foolishness like making you get new fingerprints each time – as though they changed.
Little bits of libertarianism are just breaking out all over. This has to infuse the Tea Party to some extent.
llater,
llamas
The money’s run out, we’re 14 trillion dollars in debt. Something has to be done.
If one acknowledges the above as a true statement, then proceeds to the conclusion that the party is over and spending will have to be massively reduced, then it seems to me that libertarianism is certain to be a result.
I’m supporting the TEA movement as long as that is the driving motive, to make a sea change in our spending habits. There should not be a federal Department of Labor, a Department of Energy, or Health and Human Services, or Education, to begin. All functions of government which can be pushed down closer to local levels of government, ought to be. More people were literate in the US in the days before there was a Department of Education, there were lower levels of bastardy before we had “Health and Human Services”. Friends of liberty, but guardians only of our own, we’re going to have to swallow hard and pull in our horns for a time, so I would say there are some overseas commitments we’ll have to rethink, not that I like the thought of what replaces our presence in some places.
The money’s run out, and we have no choice but to reduce what is considered an acceptable sum to give the government every year, and by “acceptable sum” I mean lower. As long as I think that’s the direction we’re headed, I’m rolling with the TEA movement.
Eggs-sactly.
Speaking of ‘acceptable sums’, let’s limit total government spending to 30% (or whatever) of GDP: the more the feds spend of that, the less the states have to spend for themselves. Instant small-fed federalism!
There are different perspectives on social policy within the Tea Party. I think the emphasis on the particular problem of government power and intervention into people’s lives and choices has made many social conservatives rethink their attitudes. Not that they’re suddenly in favor of gay marriage (that’s a religious thing that policy arguments probably can’t change) but it *has* made many reconsider the orientation of government toward marriage. I know a few Tea Party people who have begun the necessary separation of the moral questions from the policy questions. That is most certainly a good thing.
I’d have thought more constitutionalist than libertarian, but given that the bill of rights is a thoroughly libertarian document I don’t think the distinction is hugely important.
They agree the government is too big, and should be made to go stand in a corner till it learns to behave itself and know its place.
I think all the slanders about “gay rights”, “women’s rights” the left hurls at Tea Partiers is a con. What they mean is “gay privileges”, “woman’s privileges”, which of course any group who takes it’s founding creed from “all (hu)men being created equal” is going to have a problem with 😉
I’ve been particularly interested lately to hear that when the left calls Paul Ryan “misogynist”, they mean “opposes abortion”. I wonder why they don’t just say what they mean? If you assume that babies are humans, around half of them are women too – so opposing their destruction could hardly be construed as being anti-woman.
Veeshir, I think you are right. Smaller government, less stupid and intrusive government, less expensive government – beyond that there ARE no peripheral issues for the Tea Partiers. I’ve attended every Tea Party demonstration here in Columbus Ohio, going back to the first sparsely attended one, and although there is a certain amount of local color (such as opening with a prayer) the message is resolutely libertarian. Or as libertarian as is within the Overton Window at this time. Call it libertarian/conservative.
Here is a useful gauge:
Normative Libertarianism is framed by the impacts of the functions of governments on Liberty and thus to limit those impacts by limiting those functions.
It’s important to keep in mind that the Tea Party is not a political party and certainly not a monolithic organization, but rather a movement, a frame of reference. The points of commonality among its members are fiscal conservatism, a desire for smaller (federal) government and a return to historical constitutional norms. Beyond that there is a wide variety of views on social issues, moral issues, etc. It’s very much a marriage of convenience, but at this moment in time it is very convenient. If, someday, the Tea Party succeeds in reining in government and restoring some measure of fiscal sanity, it will fracture along those fault lines. (Which is why it would never survive as a true political party, periodic calls to turn it into such notwithstanding.) And that’s fine. But until then it serves a very useful purpose.
*ahem* 15.9, and closing fast on 16, last I checked
There are thousands of Tea Party groups – drawn together in alliances (of which the biggest is “Tea Party Patriots”).
The primary concern of most (although not all) Tea Party groups is OUT OF CONTROL GOVERNMENT SPENDING.
This has been so since Rick S. (on CNBC) took the people who were already insensed by TARP (supported by Bush, Obama and, FATALLY by John McCain) and stimulated them to protest in 2009 (first against an Obama plan for defaulting house loan borrowers to be subsidised and against the orgy of corruption that was and is the “Stimulus”).
The United States (indeed the Western world) is going BANKRUPT – due to the ideology of people such as Joe Biden (oh yes he does have an ideology) that higher government spending is a good thing that one has to “spend more money to avoid going bankrupt”.
I doubt that a lifelong Marxist such as Barack Obama really believes this Keynesian ideology – but whether a person actually believes in print-and-spend (as Joe Biden does) or whether one just sees it as a weapon to destroy “capitalist” society (as Obama most likely does) does not matter.
What matters is the EFFECT of the policy – not the motive of the person pushing the policy (in the case of Biden mindlessness, in the case of Obama hostilty to civil society – what he would call “capitalism”).
And the effect of the policy will be terrible.
Sadly most politicians really have not grasped the seriousness of the situation.
Even Paul Ryan (who the establishment media, such as the Economist magazine, claim wants to make savage cuts in government health, education and welfare programs) has really only proposed SLOWING THE GROWTH of the Welfare State, not CUTTING govenrment spending (surprise – the Economist magazine and the rest of the msm LIE).
When (and it is when) the economy falls off a cliff in 2013 the need to CUT govenrment spending will become even more vital (yes I know this runs against Keynesian ideology – Keynesian doctrine is WRONG).
But only a very few people (Senator Rand Paul springs to mind) are even making serious plans about how to CUT government spending.
As others have said, the Tea Party movement is made up of people that ‘span the right’ but have tried to keep a narrow focus. I’ve attended two tax day tea parties in Atlanta and can attest that the two sub-groups that are the most noticeable are the Ron Paul folks and the Fair Tax crowd. The Fair Tax is a policy idea with some national backing, and was co-authored by an Atlanta radio host (self-described libertarian and former lawyer Neal Boortz). These two groups were far and away the most ‘organized’ representatives at the events.
The only non-fiscal matter I heard rumblings about at the events were regarding border protection (gays and abortion, etc. were a non-issues). But, I’m with Jim Bennett on the issue: Democracy, Multi-culturalism and immigration. Pick any two. Multi-culturalism (the ideology, not to be confused with simply liking diversity) undermines the libertarian ideal regarding individualism and until we can bring back assimilation, mixed with individualism as the reigning expectation of immigrants, immigration must be controlled at some level. So, I see this as inline with libertarian goals, but I’m sure others will disagree.
The key point about the Tea Party, and Ron Paul to an extent, is this: it proves a libertarian faction or caucus can have traction and steer the GOP from within. Moreover, libertarian principles are not in direct tension with American conservatism, but can complement it in the political arena quite well. The Libertarian Party, in 2012 (and don’t get me started on the ‘liberaltarians’), hurts the very ideas it cherishes. The Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s success prove that there is another way to affect change if actually governing is the goal.
Just to say a personal thankyou to all those who have commented here with actual Tea Party experiences to relate. What you all say is pretty much what I was both hoping and expecting, but it certainly is good to be told.
Heritage Institute have a plan that actually cuts the deficit. Having read both that & the Ryan plan, I can say the Ryan plan is a good discussion point nothing more. To call it “radical” or “extreme” is to demonstrate how out of touch the mainstream political establishment is right now.
The TPP is the biggest grouping and because of it sticking to their “core values” (which I helped co-write) they have the most variety in the type of groups that are allied with them. Many have complained that they became to close to the Republican Party (esp co-sponsoring a primary debate), however recently they have been showing up at Libertarian Party Conventions both locally & nationally.
I second Russ’ point: at all the Tea Party events I’ve attended Ron Paulistas and Fair Tax* types have been the largest definable groups present. But as far as I can tell, most of the people there belong to neither group, but are just ordinary non-political folks who have gotten sick and tired of the way things are going and aren’t going to take it any more. In my neck of the woods (South Carolina) they tend to be overtly religious social conservatives (which is only to be expected around here), but I understand that’s not the case in other parts of the country.
* The Fair Tax plan has been around for quite a while, and while Neal Boortz did write a book about it he did not invent it. It’s quite popular in libertarian circles, but I have serious issues with it and cannot support it as it presently exists. That’s a discussion for another thread, however.