Angry Dependents: How a Liberal Describes the Tea Party

Many on the left have struggled with the identity of the Tea Party.  A New York Times columnist gives it a shot and gets some things right while missing the mark on some key points.

J.M. Biernstein penned an op-ed at the Times that starts by dissecting his view of the Tea Party platform.  The piece then descends into a rambling metaphysical attempt to weave the philosophies of Descartes and Hegel into a hypothesis on what the Tea Party wants.

Mr. Biernstein starts by making a weak pairing of absolute arguments to demonstrate contradictions within the Tea Party:

When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.

What this set of thoughts represents is an inability to understand degrees or levels of tolerance.  Tea Partier’s aren’t pushing for anarchy.  They aren’t concerned about the status quo – they are concerned about the growth of the size and scope of the government.  So let’s take each absolute pairing and analyze it:

1. Keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone
   • Tea Party Perspective: The government should not extend itself into more of our health care, nor remove freedom of choice, it should NOT make ALL of us MORE dependent on Uncle Sam
   • The difference between health care reform and Medicare – Medicare is a choice (currently).
2. Balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes
   • Tea Party Perspective: The highly-progressive and overly-complex U.S. tax system is unfair.  Fix it instead of just continuing to over-burden working and productive Americans
   • Raising taxes takes the heat off of our leadership to control spending.  Get spending under control first, then figure out what your need to ask Americans to pay for
   • Congress pays for things that are not necessarily for the good of the nation (earmarks).  Preventing more money from flowing in, might make them more frugal.
3. Let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone
   • This is a dichotomy where one doesn’t exist.  Letting individuals take care of themselves is so broad it could mean anything.
   • Leaving Social Security alone is not a sign I’ve seen at a rally.  I believe responsible reforms of Social Security are necessary.
4. Not to support Wall Street, but make sure banks can lend to small business and homeowners
   • These are two separate issues glued together to create a conflicting statement out of thin air.
     1. Not support Wall Street: No stimulus, let them fail – that’s correct.  Americans call that a “free-market”
     2. Make sure banks can lend to .. : Uh, that’s for the bank to do – Americans don’t want the government’s hands in that at all – in fact, Fanny and Freddie should have already failed

See, degrees, not this vs. that.  Reasoned objection to the government’s power-grab.

The author continues to take a stab at why the Tea Party is so “angry”.

My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

Surprise, another absolute.  So now we are absolutely dependent on the federal government?  No sir, to a degree we are dependent upon the government.  I do need the government for some things, but not for everything.  It is the current push to make all of us “absolute” dependents upon Uncle Sam that the Tea Party is opposed.  The largest difference between Mr. Biernstein’s view and a conservative’s view of what’s happening is that while he believes that we suddenly woke-up and realized we were slaves to the government, conservatives would say that the latest intentions to increase the power of the government are the straws that broke the camels back.

Next Biernstein describes Tea Party patriots as jilted lovers.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.  And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury.  All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.

To be a jilted lover, we have to have once been in-love.  Conservatives love their country, that is not the same as loving the elitist morons on Capitol Hill and within the White House.  We love what those institutions stand for, but not necessarily the elitist jerks that fill them.  I do not feel injured.  I feel like re-defining the boundaries and modifying the population within those institutions – remember in November.

As if to put a progressive exclamation point on his article, the author make the now oft claim that Tea Partiers are on the verge of an armed revolt.

In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists.  To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect.  But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”?

Well, close.  There is nothing MORE that conservatives want.  We want less, much less of everything the government is trying to take over from us.  And to answer where our “nihilistic rage” is going since there aren’t any more town halls to interrupt… November sir, November.

The one thing that J.M. Biernstein got absolutely right in his article is when he exclaimed, “There is indeed something not just disturbing, but  frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.”.  If you support a bigger government, continued reduction of individual freedoms, the D.C. power-grab and you have an elected seat in Government.. I understand why you hold that concern.

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