We often listen to the Diane Rehm show on Reno NPR while driving from Mammoth to Bishop and back. Yesterday, she interviewed three different people about the Tea Party "movement." [I put this in quotes because everyone denied that it is a movement but no one was quite sure what to call it.] Anyway, the interviews were quite good and made me realize that I should give some thought to organizing the scattered arguments that I've placed on my blog during the last few months. So here is an attempt at summary.
According to those interviewed, the Tea Party people are "fiscal and Constitutional conservatives" That is, they care most about having a small government that operates with a balanced budget [just like mom and pop] and they see this connected to a return to the "original Constitution." Supposedly they are not interested in social issues such as abortion, Gay rights, etc, but it seems clear that their position speaks to many social issues implicitly. They fly the flag of liberty and cry for reduction in taxes and restoration of personal choice. If there must be government, it should be at the state and local level where they feel that they have more say in matters. By all odds, the Federal government is seen as the big evil.
It is ironic that most of the Tea Partyers are probably the same 30% of the population who still approved of George Bush when he left office even though Bush was the one who busted the US budget, expanded Federal government, and appropriated tremendous presidential powers out of the hands of Congress and, yes, the democratic voice. Somehow, when Republicans do these things, it's OK. It was also Bush himself who was forced into bailing out the banks and the auto industry, yet another thing the Tea Partyers are angry about.
The tragedy in today's politics is that we have incredibly superficial dialogues. [Actually, I'm being overly generous to suggest that we have any dialogue at all. What we have is slogans shouted back and forth.] Politicians become favorites of the Tea Partyers by spitting their slogans back to them. So it's easy to write speeches. Just listen to the few words in the Tea Party vocabulary and throw them back at them. Watch Sarah Palin to see how this works. [Palin's single talent is knowing what the people like to hear and, I must say, she spits it back to them extremely well.]
What politics requires is a consideration of facts and a serious discussion of what we do about the facts. For instance, one of the undeniable facts of the present is the oil spill in the Gulf. It's amazing how many people want big, powerful Federal government when it comes to the oil spill. But when serious discussion indicates that this type of speculative and untested drilling should be postponed until we can get a better picture of what went wrong, the government is condemned for limiting the activities of corporations and threatening jobs. Is rational political discourse even possible in this country?
I want to summarize my political position in the following way. First, I am happy enough to return to our Constitution. It is a marvelous document and a sound foundation for our Federal government. One marvelous aspect of this document, evidently not subscribed to by the Tea Partyers, is its flexibility --- its ability to change with the times in a peaceful way without the need of revolutions in the streets. Contrary to the Constitution, the Tea Partyers are the ones in the streets.
One of the great expressions in the Constitution is its desire to promote the general welfare of the people. This is a wonderfully vague idea which can only be interpreted as time and conditions change. The strength of our Constitution lies in its ability to cope with new interpretations and, through its Supreme Court, to correct itself when things go wrong.
I believe, consistent with the philosophical basis of our founding political thinkers, that government is formed by the people. Indeed, government is the way in which the people gather to discuss and to solve their problems. In an ideal small democracy this would be literally the way things happen. We, on the other hand, are a very large nation of people and so we have to "gather" through an intricately constructed representative government. One of the huge fallacies in Tea Party thinking is that government is some dominating entity other than themselves. On the contrary, if we don't like government --- namely us --- we need to reform ourselves, which means doing a far better job of informing ourselves and then electing representatives who truly speak for us on the issues that are important. Only a well informed and educated public can make a democracy work. Our current problem is a general lack of truthful and clear information; instead, we have ridiculously simplistic propaganda and generally irrelevant "news". Meanwhile, education is eroded at every opportunity, fiscal, political, and spiritual.
It seems to me that the issue of distributing power between local, state, and Federal government is most reasonably decided by the scale of an issue before us. We should ask whether an issue is something that other people will care about and, hence, whether they will have reasonable opinions about it. If the issue is cross walks in town, it is unlikely that people outside the locality will care or have legitimate opinions. On the other hand, I do care and think that I have legitimate opinions about the treatment of African American people in this country no matter where they may live. That makes Civil Rights a Federal issue. Frankly, the more "global" we become, the more issues there are that we share on a national level and which therefore require us to meet through our Federal government.
The continual cry for small Federal government and reduction of taxes is completely vacuous unless the Tea Partyers are willing to take the whole thing apart issue by issue and demonstrate better ways of handling things. Let's take inspection and control of processed foods for example. Most processed foods are produced in specific regions of the country and then marketed all over. Can the Tea Partyers show that it would really be more cost effective and efficient to have these food products tested locally? I can't imagine the arguments. And I doubt very much that my local government would be at all interested in taking on this task. But if Federal government just gives up regulation of food production and distribution, how long will it take before we are eating rats in our sausage again?
This is just one issue. There are hundreds more. I'd be more impressed by the Tea Partyers if they would start addressing these and showing us how smaller government would really work. Unfortunately, in my opinion, they really just want their taxes lowered and they don't bother to think about the consequences, except when oil starts rolling onto their beaches and their shrimp smell like gasoline.
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