Here is someone who gets it, who understands exactly what we are talking about. Pelosi and Lindsay Gramnesty haven't got a fracking clue.
March 10, 2010
The Tea Party Spirit
Sometimes the most obvious derangements of our politics are staring us in the face but we don't see them. Take, for instance, the health care reform bill for which President Obama and the Democrats are forever lusting. Many people have protested it isn't really a reform bill, because reform implies improvement and this isn't an improvement.
But it isn't the "reform" part of the Democrats' health care bill (if they ever agree on one) that strikes me as most perverse. It's calling this voluminous monstrosity a bill. Can you have a bill, a single law, that is almost 3,000 pages long? In the old days, that would have constituted a whole code of laws. When our founders thought about law, they often thought along the lines of John Locke, who described law as a community's "settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties," emphasizing that to be legitimate a statute must be "received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies" between citizens.
This phonebook-sized law that would control a sixth of the U.S. economy cannot be a law by that definition. If you rummage through the text of, say, the House of Representatives' version of the bill, you find scores of places where power is delegated to administrative agencies and special boards, which are charged to fill the gaps in the written legislation by promulgating thousands, if not tens of thousands, of new pages of regulations that will then be applied to individual cases. Voters sometimes complain that legislators don't read the laws they enact. Why would they, in this case? You could read this leviathan until your eyeballs popped out and still not find any "settled, standing rules" or a meaning that is "indifferent, and the same to all parties."
In fact, that's the point of such promiscuous laws. They operate not by setting up fences to protect each man's liberty. They start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.
A "privilege" is literally a private law. When law ceases to be a common "standard of right and wrong" and a "common measure to decide all controversies," then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.
* * *
It was against the threat of such a despotism that proper and not so proper Bostonians threw the original Tea Party. The English East India Company was about to go bankrupt, and the British government bailed it out by passing the Tea Act of 1773, granting the Company's agents a monopoly on selling tea to Americans and filling the government's own coffers by taxing the sales. The Americans had already rejected this tax as unconstitutional in 1767, but it stayed on the books. Among the Company's agents in Massachusetts were the royal governor's two sons and a nephew. They didn't call it Chicago-style politics then, but the principles were the same.
Today's Tea Party movement sees a similar threat of despotism-of monopoly control of health care, corrupting bailouts, massive indebtedness, and the eclipse of constitutional rights-in the Obama Administration's policies. The Tea Party patriots may mistake the President's motives when they compare him to King George. But they are right to suspect in the very nature of modern liberalism and the modern state something hostile to the consent of the governed and to constitutional liberty. The republic will owe them a debt of gratitude if Obama's plans end up just as wet as George III's, floating in the salty tea pot of Boston Harbor.
checkTextResizerCookie('article_body');
20 Comments
DougMarks
The problem is that many of the tea party groups are just front for the hard core republican groups. The patriots have been usurped by the neocons. I've had personal experience with three of these local groups. They work real hard trying to hide who they are and act as if they are unfunded grass roots organizations, pure slime balls.
Anonymous
No Republican clones in our Tea Party, there were some but a minority and now gone. We formed a PAC and have endorsed some Republicans who are real conservatives, other conservatives who are Independents.
Kessler is right, of course, we want sanity in government, and it is insane to pass 3000-page bills full of.. how did LaCour put it... "special rules for special people," or as Orwell put it, "Some animals are more equal than others."
jmonroe
We have our share of die-hard Republicans in our Tea Party group. They really believe Reagan was a conservative, and that we need to "take the party back."
Gag.
That Party has NEVER been conservative in more than rhetoric.
Anonymous
I'm a bit loath to trust the opinion of anyone associated with Clairmont, which is a hotbed of Neo-cons, but this article does appear to "grok" the movement a lot better than most. As for the comments from the readers, there certainly are Tea Party groups out there formed as fronts for Neo-cons trying to reassert control of the GOP, but by and large most of the Tea Partiers I've run into are true died-in-the-whole populists with a libertarian bent. And that libertarian bent is real pliable, as is in they are more libertarian than populist, they just don't know it yet. Leading a Tea Partier to hard-core, government-hating libertarianism is as easy as giving candy to children. And the ones who don't gobble it up, well you can be pretty sure they are the moles, the ones whose names need to go on the "come the revolution list."
DHB
America’s “Post-Racist” Delusion.
Barak Obama may have a lot of detractors both among Republicans and Democrats, but if there’s one thing all Ameriklans can agree on, it’s that Obama’s rise to political stardom means that Ameriklans are no longer racist.
Yeah, right!
When one of Ameriklan’s most painful issues, its slaveowner's 200+ year old racist history, is allegedly solved because people vote for a moderate-conservative Wall Street black guy with male magazine looks and a CNN voice; who mouths words carefully written by the same backroom liars and steer everyone away from anything about real bread and butter, war and peace, issues that might upset the entrenched power structure behind the throne.
Tea Partyers Are White Nationalists, Pure and Simple
By Glen Ford
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
“The GOP is, at its core, a Rich Man's Party that relies for its mass support on people who want to vote for a White Man's Party.”
March 11, 2010 "Black Agenda Report" -- Corporate media go through all manner of contortions of logic and historical gymnastics to sanitize the Tea Party phenomenon – anything to avoid calling the people grouped under the Tea Party umbrella by their proper name: White nationalists.
White nationalism is a taboo subject in most corporate circles – and even among some on the Left.
The continued appeal of a loud and boisterous White Nationalism threatens the prevailing American mythology, shared by the likes of corporate Democrat Barack Obama and corporate Republican John McCain: the myth that racism is not endemic to American life and history.
Obama made that claim in his famous – and completely fatuous – Philadelphia campaign speech on race. Obama denounced former friend and mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright for expressing, in the candidate's words, “ a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic.”
But there it is, for all to see, alive and kicking in the 21st century in the form of a Tea Party “movement” in whose mouths the phrase “take back America” means return to a time when the United States was a self-proclaimed White Man's Country.
The Tea Partiers need go back no farther in time than Ronald Reagan, who completed Richard Nixon's “Southern Strategy” by kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place made infamous by the murder of three civil rights workers.
White Nationalist support for the Republican Party is the reason the center of GOP power lies in the states of the Old Confederacy. And it is the Republican Party that is most threatened by the White Nationalist Tea Partiers.
“The spectacle of raging White Nationalists on the march makes corporate-minded Democrats look positively leftish by comparison.”
The GOP is, at its core, a Rich Man's Party that relies for its mass support on people who want to vote for a White Man's Party.
The two are not necessarily the same thing, as the White Nationalists of the GOP discovered with the bi-partisan Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and 2009.
Anti-Wall Street sentiment runs deep in White Nationalist ranks, much of it rooted in anti-Semitism: the association of bankers and Jews. Republican Party leaders have good reason to fear that the Rich Man's Party is losing control of some of its most fervent White Nationalist troops.
Progressives have very different reasons to worry about the Tea Partiers. The spectacle of raging White Nationalists on the march makes corporate-minded Democrats look positively leftish by comparison. But that's an illusion.
African Americans are especially susceptible to calls to “circle the wagons around the Obama administration” in the face of racist attack. Black activist Dr. Ron Daniels made just such an appeal, this week.
It is a foolish, knee-jerk reaction, one that plays into the hands of the banking class and its servants in the Obama administration.
Just because some neo-Confederates call President Obama racist names, does not mean Black folks should abandon demands on their own government for jobs, peace and neighborhood stability. Dr. Daniels wants Blacks and progressives to hold a march to support Obama.
What we need to do is organize and agitate and march in support of our people's social and economic interests.
There's a big difference between the two.
The view from the other side of the tracks!
Anonymous
Had an interesting experience while waiting to see a doctor the other day. Several other middle-aged men and a couple of couples, of the same age, all over-weight, white, were also waiting in the waiting room. These were all the types of people that coastal liberals like to point to when they scream redneck Tea Partiers. At one point someone commenting on a local incident involving a teenager who had been arrested for doing something awful and it had caused a small outburst of conservation in the entire room, some of which verged on racial offensive. It was at that point that I jumped into the conversation and commented that the incident had been exacerbated by law enforcements poor handling of the incident -- and I was shocked to find that, quite literally, everyone in the room agreed with me. Not only did they agree with me, they felt that law enforcement was equally guilty in the matter. While that reflected my opinion, I was very surprised to hear that coming from this crowd. At that point, the discussion quickly swerved to national politics and the wider issue of government abuse of authority. Somebody at that point made a comment about Obama, which I expected to end badly. Boy was I wrong. Despite the earlier racial comments, the general feeling amongst this crowd was that Obama was a descent, well-intended fellow who had inherited a hell of a mess and simply didn't have the skills of the stones to stand-up to the special interests that control Washington. I honestly think their main problem with Obama wasn't that he was Black of a liberal, but rather than he didn't have the gumption to follow through on his promise of change, i.e., to clean up the mess that the idiot they had been suckered into voting for previously had made of the country. The general mood was one of disgust, not with Obama, but with politics and with government and with Washington. From a libertarian perspective, it was quite encouraging. These people certainly were not the ignorant rednecks that liberals like to stereotype, even though they sure looked the part.
Freebird
Amorphous and unorganized as they are, the Tea Parties hold the key to the 2010 elections.
Too-broad smears like "they've been co-opted by the neocons" really help move the ball forward. "they're racists" and "hicks" are even better, way to go guys, that'll really help us pull together.
Anonymous
tit for tat! the republicans deserve to get this ton of shit govt back. vote republican ,no matter how stupid they they act and talk. they are running second in the race of dumbshitology.