Reflections of a Rational Republican
What does the Tea Party get right?
Well…practically nothing!
It’s not easy to glean a coherent message from the raspy bullhorns of the Tea Party Movement. I get the part about cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reducing the deficit, but beyond those maddeningly contradictory goals all clarity breaks down into a stew of id-driven rants.
However, amidst the semi-coherent blather some common themes do emerge.
What the Tea Party gets wrong is practically everything it proposes to do about our situation. Basically, the response to Wall Street corruption is to let bankers do whatever they want.
Upset about the financial collapse? Punish the people who kept the lights on. The corrupting influence of money on our politics can be remedied by allowing unlimited campaign contributions.
Worried about crumbling infrastructure? Slash spending. And the unchecked drain of capital from ordinary Americans to the wealthy all over the world can be fixed by cutting taxes on the richest Americans.
Basically, the Tea Party is a fantastic, principled expression of ordinary Americans’ frustration with our broken politics. And along the way, Tea Partiers demonstrate with depressing clarity the kind of laziness that got us here in the first place. In the face of complex problems, they spout slogans. They propose to fix our collective roof by burning the house down while we’re all left inside. There’s no problem so complex that it can’t be solved with a can of gasoline and some oily rags.
What the Tea Party has demonstrated more than anything is how easily real concerns about concrete matters can in this country be redirected and neutralized. Facing an angry mob? Dangle some fear of foreigners and their wicked religions, mix in some resentment of mooching minorities, and you can make them do whatever you want.
Perhaps the Tea Party will prove to be a good start, an initial step in the right direction. Maybe it will eventually spur us to care more about the details and look for serious solutions to our problems. Good things can and do happen. Or maybe the movement will just cannibalize itself in an escalating spiral of extremism and paranoia. Maybe they’ll find the “real” birth certificate.
We’ll see.
ChrisLadd is a Texan living in the Chicago area. He has been involved in grassroots Republican politics for most of his life. He watched with alarm as the Party in his home state grew more and more tolerant of extremes and intolerant of reason. The Republican Party is still the best fit for his politics, but it's an increasingly uncomfortable home. Chris graduated from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas with a BA in politics and economics and earned a law degree from the University of Houston.