Tea Parties, Progressives and Liberty

In the past I have recommended the book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg as one of the most transformative books I have read in the past few years. Today I read a two page article that did a nice job of making a similar point all while tying in the phenomenon of Tea Parties as well. Party Like It's 1773 by Richard Samuelson makes the case that the original tea party has some real connection to its modern version and that the common bond is a distrust of a governing elite. 

What do today's tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement "is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective." Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.

Samuelson is the 2009-2010 Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program, and an Assistant Professor of History at California State University so his opinion on matter historical bears listening to. That he can see a kinship between our Founding Fathers and a modern movement that many (including myself) find questionable is intriguing. He goes on to make the point that Goldberg made in his book: that the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century attempted to rewrite the social contract between the governement and the governed.

In the early twentieth century America's leading intellectuals concluded that our constitution was out of date. Woodrow Wilson said quite bluntly that "we are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past." The founders, he noted, "speak of the ‘checks and balances' of the Constitution." Such ideas were passe. By replacing checks and balances with a simplified administration, he would update and rationalize the American state. Wilson, we should recall, was our first and only PhD president. The social science PhD was a new invention in his day. Wilson believed that experts, armed with PhDs and law degrees, could make better choices than the common people and the politicians they elected. Armed with expertise, Progressive bureaucrats would rule effectively and fairly. Checks and balances, he thought, were no longer necessary.

This, in essence, is what makes  many Americans nervous about the Obama administration. I for one do not think he is an evil man, hatching devious plots in a backroom of the White House with plans to turn the U.S. into a 1950's style U.S.S.R.. However, I do think he is a highly educated, well-intentioned man, who believes he knows better than the rest of us how make choices about our future. As a thought experiment let's assume he is better than the rest of us and he really does know how to "remake" our country. There is a fatal flaw in this argument. Progressives want to take the power out of the people's hands and place it in a benevolent dictator's. Once that happens it is not a simple process to reverse. Inevitably, people who are not benevolent will rise to power and then we have a situation like the former U.S.S.R.. Some on the left today do not seem to realize this simple fact.

When Thomas Friedman, the voice of the establishment, declares that "one-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages," he reflects the goal of Progressive politics since Wilson's day. He also echoes the ideas of the Tories of the 1760s and 1770s. Like the Tories, today's would-be elites claim that better training and education gives them the right to rule, although the Progressives and their children have largely dropped birth and wealth as criterion for rule.

 In short, the modern Tea Party has it's place in our national dialogue. Though some of what they say and do is uncomfortable or extreme, the core of their message is true. "When the government is unresponsive to the views of the people, and, beyond that, when our administrative and judicial branches restrict the scope of the people's legislative rights, protest rises." Those protests are the Tea Party.