Tea & Me
Below, Conor beats me to that NYT piece on the tea partiers. My take is a bit different. When it comes to reforming the right, a phrase I use advisedly, Conor and I are allied — as has been clear enough for at least a year — in some important respects. In others, however, there are important divergences. The latest reflection on the demise of Culture11 (yes, these are still being written) is worth a read, but I must disavow impressions like the following:
Culture 11 writers like Conor Friedersdorf and James Poulos are are in bad odor with most who consider themselves “real” conservatives, largely because they sometimes speak well of liberals and take a decidedly less ideological approach to their writings.
I hope I’m not in bad odor with self-identified real conservatives for a number of reasons, but at the top of the list is my own self-identification as — well, let’s say a ‘mere conservative’. I suppose any confusion on this count is my own doing. During and immediately after the Culture11 years (2008-2009), my ‘project’, such as it was, involved what now strikes me as a far too academic move to peck tactically at the edges of certain debates while taking up strategically, for purposes of criticism, a position too readily mistaken for a view from nowhere. Even on its own terms, I can’t say that approach worked. But trying to match my dispositions, commitments, and convictions — to speak the language I tried to work with back then — to events on the ground in such a way as to ‘declare for’ one team or another seemed like an exercise in pundit theater. Often, in DC, if you want to make it as a pundit the first thing you must do (and sometimes the only thing) is pick, defend, and advocate for a team with the enthusiasm, if not the sophistication, of a well-paid lawyer. I hoped my unwillingness to sign up for an ism — neocon, paleo, libertarian, whatever — would be made good by the sweeping changes of ’09: the election of Obama, the defeat of the Clintons and Clintonism, the waning of the Iraq War, and, of course, the Econopocalypse. I bet that those things would make it possible again to speak intelligibly and successfully as an undifferentiated or otherwise unclassifiable conservative.
In the best post-mortem on Culture11, I was described as “far too idiosyncratic in [my] own politics” to get wrapped up in the “self-immolating Hindenburg of movement conservatism.” Since it’s movement conservatism itself that has started to change that formulation — courtesy, in no small part, of the tea partiers, I’m obliged, I think, to return the favor and step out from behind the mannered meta-critiques of yesteryear. This is a good place to start.
The nut of Conor’s post is this:
Should Tea Party activists rise in the party from the bottom up, they’ll begin from the mistaken premise that the GOP is in a mess because it elects closet liberals. As I’ve noted before, this is incorrect: though Tea Party attendees may imagine that the folks who sold them out during the Bush Administration were insufficiently conservative in their ideology, the fact of the matter is that folks like Karl Rove and Tom Delay were calling the shots and doing the most harm. I’ve heard those men called corrupt, but I’ve never heard them called RINOs.
I don’t think the premise that the GOP is in trouble because it has too many RINOS is mistaken at all. (And let’s be clear: Republican liberals are out of the closet.) The trouble arises when conservatives conclude wishfully that the only problem the GOP faces is its liberals, and that, therefore, the GOP’s only, and final, solution is the elimination of its liberals. Occasionally, successful, established movement conservatives will talk this way. It’s easy for them, because they’re competing with successful, established liberal Republicans for control of the party apparatus. Following their lead, movement conservatives who aren’t quite as establishment, but whose constituencies have long been established pillars of the Republican grassroots, sometimes do the same.
But if there’s any group that’s least in danger of falling prey to the trap Conor identifies — aside from RINOs themselves, and would-be neutral referees of intraparty politics — it’s tea partiers. It’s precisely because putatively conservative Republicans have failed so spectacularly to deliver conservative governance that the tea partiers have moved to separate their identity and their organization from those of the GOP.
Yes, tea partiers have little praise for the Olympia Snowes of the world, but tea partiers recognize above all that the legacy of the Bush years would have been no better, and the GOP of today no better equipped to break free from it in the way necessary to defeat Obama, had the Olympia Snowes of the world been run out on their respective rails. If Republican liberals are irrelevant to the root problem, more Republican liberals would bring, at worst, greater irrelevance. They are not a poison but a distraction — one might almost say a red herring. From the tea party perspective, the idea that ‘more RINOs’ are the solution to a breakdown of conservatism in the congressional and party leadership is merely a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
The problem, as my fellow erstwhile Culture11er Ericka Andersen recently tweeted, is less that Americans stopped liking “what the GOP is supposed to deliver” than that “they stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered.” Supposedly, this tension reflects a war over “the heart and soul of the Republican party,” one centered on deep disagreements over exactly what the GOP is supposed to deliver. Indeed, small-c conservative Americans, regardless of party, have resisted the Republican slide into establishmentarian corporatism since, in our time, the rise and fall of Ross Perot.
The forceful way in which the tea partiers are putting this conservative resistance at the center of our political debate today should remind us of what went wrong for Republicans during the two Bush presidencies. The Bush presidents, different in so many ways, both turned the GOP toward corporatism in a way that significantly limited their success as candidates and presidents. (Reagan had neither problem. This is the root of Reagan nostalgia.) The lesson is a simple one: first and foremost, the Republican party is supposed to deliver not economic nor cultural but political goods.
The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around, help make this clear. Take taxes. When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it. The evil of taxes is not primarily economic but political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor. The GOP is supposed to keep this kind of tyranny at bay, and when it comes near, the GOP is supposed to ward it off.
It’s in this regard that, over the past ten years, the GOP has failed. The trouble with RINOs is that, in their liberalism, they are often either blind to the threat of tyranny or they do not really see it as a problem. This is not because they ‘fail to understand the nature’ of tyranny. Tyrannical regimes can rule over dynamic, exciting societies, over huge numbers of people full of promise and purpose. They can focus resources on big challenges and execute amazing feats of efficiency and publicity. Just ask the growing number of American commentators suffering from China envy.
Moreover, liberals of any party seeking primarily to foster or facilitate cultural change typically have little desire to focus their attention, much less their careers, on preventing the government from aggrandizing itself. A government that routinely manages economic behavior through its economic policy is well able to routinely manage social and personal behavior that way. In theory, there’s no reason why lots of Republicans can’t be ‘socially liberal but fiscally conservative.’ In practice, social liberals, of any party, have a vested interest in a government that rules not only by law but by economics.
In fact, tea partiers help everyone understand that ‘fiscal conservatism’ is a misleading phrase. A ‘fiscal conservative’ is for balanced budgets and well-calibrated taxes and against wasteful spending. A tyrannical government, if it has any brains, is for solvency and efficiency too. ‘Fiscal conservatism’ can license the aggrandizement and abuse of government power. It might be necessary to economic conservatism, but it isn’t sufficient. Alone, it isn’t conservatism at all, and under the right conditions, ‘fiscal conservatism’ can actually destroy its namesake.
Which brings us to Tom “no more pork to cut” DeLay and Bush’s Brain himself. That these men are not liberal Republicans does not mean they failed completely as conservatives, which they did. No amount of cultural signaling can make up for the level of federal aggrandizement DeLay and Rove supervised. DeLay and Rove leveraged conservatives’ salutary obsession with taxes into an abusive relationship: ride along on the road to tyranny, and there’s another tax cut in it for you! Those cuts were real, and sometimes even significant. But tax policy is ultimately a means to an end, and the end DeLay and Rove pursued made a mockery of the means.
Who, if not the tea partiers, is out front today with this message? I see very little danger that the tea partiers will scrap their substantive politics in favor of the fluff symbolism of witch hunt theater. Unless, that is, they are suckered by Sarah Palin — a temptress indeed. But that is a story for another time.
Here’s my short, sweet and simple take on the Demise of Culture 11.
Culture 11 was designed as an elegant decarian Math to preserve the best of conservatism while the GOP descended into populist barbarism around it….which, you must admit, is exactly what is happening.
Breitbart’s Big Hollywood started up the very day Culture 11 winked out of existance.
So, pretty much epic fail.
Unfortunately the analogy requires reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem to understand it.
— matoko_chan · Jan 16, 06:40 PM · #
Unless, that is, they are suckered by Sarah Palin — a temptress indeed.
Then perhaps….you might explain to the teabaggers that Palin probably can’t be president unless she can give public speeches and open press conferences? One might even consider that your and Conor’s duty, to point that out.
I don’t think there will be a no-follow-on questions option for her in another debate either.
Are the teabaggers planning a presidential putsch to install Palin?
Because that looks like the only way she can get there from here.
— matoko_chan · Jan 16, 06:59 PM · #
This may be outside the scope of this post but I’d be interested in you expanding on a general proposition in your post.
You write: “The evil of taxes is…political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road…to tyranny…”
I assume you mean tyranny in the common parlance, which is a government that exerts oppressive power on its citizens. So I wonder what you mean when you identify a government as tyrannical that uses taxes to control and manage its behavior. This definition would seem to imply that Western Europe is chocked full of tyrannical governments and that the difference between China and England is one of degree not difference. I don’t think you are drawing that sort of moral equivalence, but that’s what it sounds like. In addition, I can’t think of any government at any point in the last 100 years that does not use the type of taxation that you deplore. What sort of ideal government are you imaging then?
Furthermore, I am unclear what makes a government that taxes to change its citizens behavior is by definition tyrannical. I am assuming you are not using this definition tautologically, where taxes that modify citizen’s behavior are by definition tyrannical. Rather, I infer that you believe citizen behavior modification through taxation inflicts oppression on its citizens. But that leads to my next question: what makes this type of taxation by definition oppressive? Is this a cagetorical statement where taxation is oppression in all cases, or is it contextual?
If its a categorical statement, then it sounds like one of those irreducible first principles that Randians, pro-life and pro-choicers, neo-cons, progressives and sundried others adhere to. Nothing wrong with that of course but it would be the end of the conversation I’d like to have.
If it is contextual though, can you define 1) what types of behavior modification through taxation is acceptable 2) which are not 3) and why and 4) then explain what the oppressive consequences of the unfavorable taxation is. In a word, I’d like to see if you could define some principles on taxation and apply them concretely to our policy environment.
— Joseph · Jan 16, 07:14 PM · #
“The evil of taxes is…political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road…to tyranny…”
“DeLay and Rove leveraged conservatives’ salutary obsession with taxes into an abusive relationship: ride along on the road to tyranny, and there’s another tax cut in it for you! “
Do you only care about taxes when they are used to increase tyranny? Say there is a president/congress that desreased tyranny but increased taxes. Would that be OK with you?
— cw · Jan 16, 07:42 PM · #
“ the tea partiers have moved to separate their identity and their organization from those of the GOP.”
The tea parties where I live have been organized by local GOP party leaders and have invited elected GOP politicians to speak at their events. I don’t see any separation.
— Mercer · Jan 16, 07:50 PM · #
With all due respect: The way you write undermines the point you are trying to make. The “idea” of the tea-partiers seems to have roused you from postmodern inscrutables, yet your remarks remain within those peripheries. The elevation of political over economic or cultural “goods” (I’m assuming the pun stands) leads to a first principle that seems an open invitation to political irresponsibility. Let’s take taxes: “When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it.” The point (contra Joseph) is essentially inarguable: “aggrandizement” is provocative yet slippery enough to let “always” pass. What you get with this is a purely negative ideology that, when forced to posit an alternative to state-aggrandizement, offers up a sort of “personal aggrandizement” writ large: Palin seems very much in line with that.
— mw · Jan 17, 01:30 AM · #
Very intelligent – very clear — very insightful.
I wrote something similar, though not as well-written and focused, here —
http://bonzai.squarespace.com/blog/2010/1/16/an-adult-american-society.html
— mike farmer · Jan 17, 01:59 AM · #
I just can’t take any consideration of taxation, particularly taxation as “tyranny,” seriously when it doesn’t acknowledge a simple fact that is so often ignored, as it is here: the people who have been trying to lower tax rates in this country have been fantastically successful. Check the top marginal tax rates from 30 years ago, 25 years ago. Check the total rate of taxation. Grover Norquist and his merry band have been winning, winning, winning. And yet there’s no acknowledgment of that in this analysis, or in any of the contemporary conservative complaints about taxation and “tyranny.”
(Please note: under tyranny, you don’t get to complain about the tyranny on bohemian political blogs like this one. Under tyranny, if you complain about the tyranny, they kick your door down, disappear you to a concentration camp, and kill you. If anyone needs a reference point, this is what actual tyranny looks like .)
By historical American standards, are tax rates are low. It’s true! And you know what? Our economy was not a permanent basket case when we had truly high tax rates, and we were not under tyranny then, either. Conversely, lowering tax rates dramatically, as we have, did not result in the whole panoply of benefits and advantages to this country that we have been promised so many times.
Now the exact right rates of taxation and spending are and will always be subject to disagreement by serious people. But to operate in a context like we do where we talk endlessly about high taxes when our taxes are not high by the standards of other developed, first-world nations and our own historical context is not responsible. Any responsible complaints about high taxation has to include the information that we paid much more in what is, by historical standards, the recent past.
— Freddie · Jan 17, 03:40 PM · #
In other words, I completely missed the point of the post.
— Freddie · Jan 17, 07:54 PM · #
Tea partiers stand for the idea that our current government doesn’t work — an accurate diagnosis, in the way that saying “something’s wrong” is accurate when you find yourself pissing viscous globules of puss and blood. But I haven’t seen anything to suggest that these tea partiers are MDs; their prescriptions are palliative, not curative. Better than humping the statism, of course.
But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Tea Partiers understand the extent of it. The problem is not political or personal or particular; it is historical and systemic and supervening. No cadre of dogooders can do anything about it. And so we await the clearing fire of crisis, a liberating criticality which may never come. Until then, we’re yelling at each other over deck chair layout.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 17, 08:20 PM · #
“No amount of cultural signaling can make up for the level of federal aggrandizement DeLay and Rove supervised.”
For a thoughtful guy like you, James, this is probably true. However, for a very large part of the conservative base, the cultural signaling was and is more than enough to make up for the level of federal aggrandizement DeLay and Rove supervised. In fact, that cultural signaling is all they want and need, in practice.
Maybe the Tea Partiers will change that, but I see no evidence of such a change of attitude. The cultural resentments are all there, once you scratch the surface, and I suspect the reason why one doesn’t see much discussion of social/cultural issues at Tea Party rallies is because it’s a given within the club where most everyone stands on such issues.
— Mark in Houston · Jan 17, 08:36 PM · #
The idea that Tea Partiers are animated first and foremost by ‘purgism’ seems to be belied by the outsized enthusiasm shown for Scott Brown by those at the forefront of the TP movement — as Reihan notes here. Anti-statism seems to be doing most of the work in that race.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 17, 10:58 PM · #
Pfft KVS, you simpleton.
It is the desire TO WIN that animates them.
Besides, they don’t relly believe Brown is pro-choice, and they are only against the Other Side posing naked in f*ckbooks (see Prejean, Carrie).
They know hes a grifter. insert exagerated Palin wink here
— matoko_chan · Jan 18, 12:14 AM · #
What I say?
Shove a curling iron up her butt.
The crowd responded enthusiastically as Brown made his case against AG Martha Coakley (D)—even interrupting frequently to make Brown’s case for him. “I’ll tell you what,” Brown said, using a megaphone to address the crowd. “There’s negative campaigning, and then there’s malicious campaigning.” “She’s malicious!” a man in the crowd cried out. “She’s a phony!” shouted another. “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” a third man interjected a few moments later.
When are you guys going to admit you are on the wrong side?
When all the “tea party activist” rallies look like Weimar 2010 isn’t it time to say something?
— matoko_chan · Jan 18, 12:23 AM · #
Matoko, I hope you’re attractive. Otherwise you’d be absolutely worthless.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 18, 12:49 AM · #
Poulos is giving the tea-partiers way too much credit. While it is true that they see tax reform as necessary but not sufficient, they still see each and every tax cut as a concrete reduction of tyranny. Therefore, if he wants to posit a causal relationship between the past decade’s tax policy and the “aggrandizement” of the state, Poulos needs to criticize the very people that he wants to praise. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t recall Mark Williams cheering on the Bush tax cuts one day and criticizing the rest of his agenda the next.
— Tim Crimmins · Jan 18, 01:51 AM · #
Jesus, Sargent. And people think I’m an asshole.
— Chet · Jan 18, 03:47 AM · #
on parle du diable, KVS.
Scott Brown smiles at curling iron up the butt remark.
Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only joking. —TMBG
— matoko_chan · Jan 18, 04:02 PM · #
Not to be too simplistic but Reagan (and I’m no “knee-jerk conservative”) did say it best when stating “Government IS the problem”.
Power is a tool that begs to be used. And that tool comes from us. How does one govern without “overusing” that power and not seem “ineffectual”?
There is irony in those crying “tyranny” also declaring “something must be done!” (and presumably done by the Government.)
— C3 · Jan 18, 05:08 PM · #
“The idea that Tea Partiers are animated first and foremost by ‘purgism’ seems to be belied by the outsized enthusiasm shown for Scott Brown by those at the forefront of the TP movement”
That may be true. It also may be true that the Tea Partiers are simply going with the only viable option they have in this race, which also happens to be a race whose results could stop Obama’s health care reform plans. Any port in a storm. Further, it may also add support to the argument that the Tea Partiers are just an auxiliary / foot soldiers group for the GOP, not some third force.
— Mark in Houston · Jan 18, 05:24 PM · #
I’ve been sock-puppeted, I see. No, the second comment isn’t mine, and to whoever posted it, from James himself: “ yours is the point to make, and contend with / rebut”.
— Freddie · Jan 18, 07:21 PM · #
http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2010/01/of-tea-parties-and-tyranny/
— E.D. Kain · Jan 18, 09:56 PM · #
James, a fine point about fiscal conservatism…since at times that’s been Friedersdorf’s tag, perhaps he can respond. As I’ve said before in these (rather slummy) precincts of internet comment-dom, Conor is probably no longer any sort of conservative by anyone’s exisitng definitions or categories, he’s rather some kind of centrist, and obviously a pretty interesting one. And despite the fact that you two were/are allied in seeing that the likes of Palin are temptresses for the right, the divergences between you have always been obvious. That is, I and most conservatives could never fully defend Conor from someone like Mark Levin on the broad points (even though I sure can’t defend Levin on the chapter-and-verse points about polite discourse that Conor made) about the anti-Obama zietgeist and conservative loyalty. In a nutshell, people may mistakenly think you’re out there in the postmodern clouds, but you ultimately do not look down on the Tea Partiers (or evangelicals, for that matter) the way the likes of Conor (i.e., Frum) really unfortunately do. And that’s why, as in this post, you’re in a position to help the Tea Partiers who read this become better Tea Partiers, whereas they really would have reason to distrust Conor.
But the times are a changin’, and this is as hopeful a day in recent politics as we’ve had in a long time.
— Carl Scott · Jan 21, 09:51 PM · #