A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged Tea Party
Column on Sharron Angle & the Right to be Armed
Sep 18th
Sharron Angle & the Right to be Armed
Tibor R. Machan
It is not an unfamiliar ploy–if you have no arguments, try to ridicule or just be snide, belittle your adversary. This is what has been going on with the messages sent by the Tea Party.
I follow write ups in The New Republic and elsewhere and to this date I have found no arguments advanced against what the Tea Party is saying–for example, that the United States federal government has an impermissibly wide scope; that the government’s debt is a huge burden on future generations which cannot even vote on what they are getting into; that the Second Amendment was included in the U. S. Constitution in part so as to enable citizens to resist tyranny should it come to their having to do so; that coercing people to buy anything, health insurance of sandals, is unconstitutional and certainly immoral; that forcing citizens to pay for policies such as federally funded abortions which they object to as a matter of their religious convictions is also abhorrent, etc., etc. All these snooty people seem to be able to do nothing more about their dislike of the Tea Party is to assassinate the character of the membership and leadership.
I am no great fan of the Tea Party’s style, fancying myself to be more cosmopolitan than nearly all those I associate with it, yet that is irrelevant when it comes to considering political alternatives. We aren’t talking fashion or erudition here but public policy and last I checked members of the Tea Party, like I and most everyone I know in this country, are a significant portion of the public.
Even if you are an unprincipled politician or merely a cheerleader of your candidates and representatives, you must at least pay attention to the fact that Tea Party members are part of the democratic electorate. So in this substantially democratic polity they are entitled to be included in the discussion of the issues even if their message strikes all the sophisticated, snooty bunch at The New York Review of Books and the The New York Times as way off base.
It is interesting to me how morally righteous these people can be when it comes to racial or gender prejudice but how little they care about dismissing a very sizable segment of the American public such as those who are part of the Tea Party. Don’t they even sense how hypocritical it is for them to champion “the people” but then drop almost half of those people from the ranks of those who should matter politically, whose input must be taken seriously? I guess not!
A good case in point is the flack Sharron Angle of Nevada has received for reminding us all that the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution had something to do with empowering citizens to resist tyranny, should their government go completely corrupt. As she said on a talk show, “You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.” Never mind the pedigree–The Washington Post and a host of other “liberal” media and politicians tried to discredit the lady for saying what is quite true and not at all weird, except if you think like compliant government subjects across the globe.
Yes, the idea is an utterly respectable one, put forth by the likes of English political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and it even makes an appearance in the Declaration of Independence. As the document puts it, “But when a long train abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Although in terms deployed by nearly all the people across the globe the American federal government may appear to be but a pussycat, in terms of the American political tradition today’s American government is very nearly despotic. (What else would one consider its brutal prosecution of the war on drugs, for example?)
But never mind, perhaps Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle of Nevada is misguided to think that mentioning this feature of the Second Amendment is relevant today. So then argue it out and do not treat it as if it were the ravings of a lunatic. Cannot the Tea Party opponents mount a good case against the idea instead of pretending it is nonsense? Perhaps not, so they must resort to ridicule and belittlement.
That, in turn, should inform the rest of the electorate just how impoverished are the views of those who wish to hold on to the status quo, who want the federal government to continue moving in the direction typified by Obamacare, massive government bailouts, and the war on drugs! If so, then I say all the more reason to get in line with the Tea Party and “throw off such government”!
Column on Tea Party Strategy Anyone?
Sep 17th
Tea Party Strategy Anyone?
Tibor R. Machan
My involvement in Tea Party matters is virtually nil. I follow the movement’s doings by reading both pro and con comments on its candidates and leaders, as well as listening to what some of the active members say in public forums. (Let me tell you the snooty Left is scared stiff of the Tea Party and rolling out its heavy guns to demean it, with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin serving as convenient targets whose lack of academic erudition is held against them in massive articles in prominent magazines like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books!)
As far as I can determine, the Tea Party is a kind of Right Wing populist assembly of people who have disparate ideas and objectives but are united in being disgusted with the leadership in Washington. There is among them room for nearly anyone who shows a positive attitude about main street America. Social conservatives, especially, seem to be welcome, what with pretty heavy moralizing as their central pitch; free market champions, too, tend to be accepted but not if they are also committed civil libertarians who might stand up for illegal immigrants and oppose the vicious War and Drugs; certainly members of the religious Right are not only welcome but often take leadership roles; and there are others, including those loyal to the American Founders and their central documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. (Sometimes they express themselves in questionable terms, such as swearing loyalty to the U. S. Constitution; but that document is now so watered down, so far from the principles stated in the Declaration, that it scarcely says anything about what the country’s political system and public policies ought to be all about.)
I am no spin doctor and do not have my finger on the pulse of the electorate, although I do try to keep abreast. It occurs to me that if the Tea Party is to have a solid chance at influencing American politics and public policy it will have to pare down its message to certain fundamentals and express this publicly in palatable ways.
The one principle that is truly representative of America as the Founders conceived of it is limited government, limited by the principle of individual liberty. Perhaps turning to this message with a clear emphasis on not trying to impose anything else on the country could be successful. If a Tea Party candidate or leader is pressed for views on matters other than the proper scope of government, the answer should be: “No comment on that since it isn’t a part of politics proper, not in a free country!” Yes, it is judicious, prudent to simply refuse to get caught up in all the issues that people may bring to the political table by teaching the lesson that they really aren’t political, even if they are on the minds of millions of people.
Tea Party members, leaders, candidates and the like may well succeed by adhering to this strategy of not allowing their detractors to involve them in everything. They could point out that this country isn’t supposed to be a totalitarian system in which politics takes over everything, addresses all issues on the minds of the citizenry. No, one need not have an opinion on creationism, intelligent design, child reading, drug use, and yes, even abortion. Let most of these topics be part of our social discourse, not our political thinking. That way the central Tea Party theme of reigning in the scope of government is kept in focus and the pluralism of the movement can also continue to flourish but within its proper domain, namely, the variety of social positions the huge tent of those who love liberty makes possible.
Yes, this way of going about things might link the Tea Party too closely with its libertarian faction but that could be a political asset if intelligently put (during interviews, press conferences, etc.). Do not permit the detractors to draw Tea Party people into discussions about matters that are not the proper concern of politics and public affairs. Therein might lie a way to victory, especially now that suspicion with governmental meddling is rife throughout the citizenry.
And this attitude can easily be linked to the central, crucial tenets of the American political tradition, the founding documents and the thinking of the Founders. That they may not all be entirely palatable in our age will not matter if discussions and proposals are kept to essentials. What is exceptional about America is its limited government tradition and moving away from this is wrong, inefficient, and, yes, un-American.
Column on Most Americans Just Don’t Get It
Aug 28th
Most Americans Just Don’t Get It
Tibor R. Machan
It bothers me to no end that millions of Americans simply don’t get just how dangerous this current administration’s views are, especially about the nature of our basic rights.
I suppose I should not be surprised, given the utterly perverted primary and secondary education most people receive now in their government run schools. After all, those very schools and everyone with a job in the system, depend upon the flat out rejection of the idea of our basic, natural rights spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. For if each of us does in fact have an unalienable right to our life, our liberty, our pursuit of our happiness and the rest, then those schools exists in direct contradiction to these rights. They are built with the loot the politicians and bureaucrats confiscate from the citizenry, loot that involves the violation of those basic rights the Declaration states every human being has!
So then in order to continue the confiscation of our resources with impunity at all levels of state, it is required that the confiscators deny those rights. And that is just what has transpired–in our era the White House and its legal team, lead by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, insist that government creates our rights, that we have none based on our human nature. That we if one complains about these people extorting from us our life-times and our property, i.e., a chunk of our very lives, the politicians and bureaucrats can retort that these are not really ours at all, we have no rights apart from what they decide we have! (This is exactly what some of the stars of contemporary political theory preach!) That is what it means to claim that government creates our rights and we have none based on our humanity! That is what it means to claim that instead of governments being instituted so as to secure our basic natural, prelegal rights, governments just happen to exist and do with us as they please, like monarchs, tsars, dictators, pharaohs and Caesars used to, proclaiming that they have the divinely obtained authority to do so. When Thomas Hobbes strove to defend the unlimited authority of government without appealing to its divine appointment, he retained the core authoritarian idea that genuine rights are the product of the sovereign’s will and that, therefore, no subject could have rights against the sovereign. The anti-authoritarian resistance to tyrannical government that was manifested in 17th and 18th century Ango-American political history was grounded in the idea that government itself is subject to moral constraints that it neither creates nor can abrogate.
This is why this utter distortion of the nature of government and our basic rights must be something to which American citizens should pay the utmost attention instead of dosing through the experience. They do appear to be in a semi coma about it, except for a few, like Judge Napolitano at Fox-TV. But the vast majority are clueless about just how dangerous is the current administration’s legal philosophy. Incredibly they behave like those sad peons of past centuries who tended to accept without much question that some human beings are mysteriously authorized to rule them and they have no justification to call this rule into question. All those ideas and ideals with which American had been associated, albeit even then not closely enough, about how when governments begin to act as tyrants they may be dismissed from their job, seem to have been forgotten. Instead the vast majority has come to accept their reactionary status as mere subjects to whom governments simply promise–though rarely deliver–various benefits in return for their silence and compliance.
Any protests, as put forth by some of the Tea Party people, are dismissed by the elite–writing in forums such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, etc.–with the sneers and snootiness of an untouchable elite. (And even the few well positioned conservative skeptics tend to refuse to truly challenge all this, apparently because they, too, want not to reaffirm universal, unalienable individual rights but to wrest power and establish their Right wing version of coercive statism.)
Although in the long haul there is still cause for some optimism–after all, the American system of government, dedicated as it was supposed to be, to the protection of the individual rights of the citizenry, is a very radical notion and its principles require a great deal of ongoing vigilance to be fully realized–for the time being it does appear that the truly exceptional Americanism that distinguished the country from those around the globe (including, especially, the European top down systems the Founders and Framers wanted to disown) is under full assault.
The currently fashionable European system of democratic socialism–which, in practice, comes to nothing else but a type of fascism–is all the rage in Washington. And this country’s exceptional standing is now scoffed at by our political thinkers and leaders. It is time to wake up to this travesty and to do something decisive about it. And that must start in the hearts and minds of the citizenry.
Column on Tea PArty vs. ACORN, etc.
May 31st
Tea Party versus ACORN, etc.
Tibor R. Machan
It looks like the way the Right despises ACORN, the Left does the Tea Party. It may not even be so much about their political stances, although that is part of it for sure. It is sad, though, that supporters of Mr. Obama had no problem with–indeed were proud of–his history of community organization but forget about this completely as they deride the Tea Party. And I am not just talking about Leftist talk show hosts and hostesses but snooty publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Instead of celebrating this clearly democratic phenomenon, the Left is demonizing it.
It is one thing to be against the ideas of some organization, quite another to be against organizing itself. Why would organizing be proper and commendable for Leftist causes but not for those of the Right? The Tea Party isn’t some criminal gang burning down building, upending cars, and so forth–they march, mostly, and now and then shout out loud.
But I suppose what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander, right? Well, let me add something then to objections against ACORN. Unlike the Tea Party phenomenon, ACORN has a history of freely dipping into public funds in support of its activities, never mind that these are certainly not approved of by all the taxpayers whose funds are being used by the organization. So while the Tea Party has that integrity about it, namely, supporting its mission by voluntary means, the means it advocates for solving problems in society, you cannot say this for ACORN and a whole lot of other Leftists outfits that have no problem with using their critics’ funds.
This is something about which the Left has been very hypocritical over the years I have been aware of its political efforts in America and even before. On the one hand the Left, or most of them, opposed, say, the War in Vietnam and wanted to be able to refuse to pay the portion of taxes that funded this war. Yet when it comes to the Right’s objection to government funded abortion clinics, this doesn’t sit well with them at all. Indeed, whereas many on the Left would wish to withdraw government funding of whatever it is they oppose–subsidies to industries, bailouts, etc.–they seem to have no problem with using such funding for their own objectives.
But this is nothing very new, vis-a-vis the Left’s political philosophy. From as long as there has been a Left, the official position has opposed the individual’s basic right to private property–the first on the list of what must be abolished, according the Marx and Engels in their The Communist Manifesto. But at the same time the Left insists that the labor of the working classes is being ripped off by capitalists in the employment relationship.
So it seems the right to private property is just fine and dandy when it comes to the labor of the proletariat! However, when it comes to governing actual socialist societies, the Left has no problem with treating labor as anything but private property. No labor is public property; so that the East Germans who were attempting to flee the country could be considered thieves because they were stealing labor from the public! (This is one excuse the government gave for shooting those trying to scale the Berlin Wall back in those days!)
Maybe this is just another feature of a substantially pragmatic political outlook–never mind any principles, just forget ahead any which way you can get away with. Here is how it was put by Lenin: “Only one thing is needed to enable us to march forward more surely and more firmly to victory: namely, the full and complete thought of our appreciation by all communists in all countries of the necessity of displaying the utmost flexibility in their tactics. The strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism must be combined with the ability to make all the necessary practical compromises, to attack, to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, etc.” [Lenin, "Left Wing Communism," 1920].
Column on NYT’s Tea Party Coverage
Apr 19th
NYT’s Tea Party Coverage
Tibor R. Machan
In the Sunday, April 18, 2010 New York Times article “Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless,” the author, Kate Zernike, discusses a poll done by The Times and CBS News on Tea Party members. The gist of the findings is that the members are reasonably well off folks, with a higher than average level of education.
The piece has the usual tone when The Times discusses those whose views it despises–snooty, derisive, and uninterested in substance, as if what these people believed was some kind of disease, not worth serious consideration. The piece went into the history of Tea Party members, associating them with 60s conservatism. Like those sociological studies that aim to explain away people’s thinking, treating it as an affliction rather than a product of considered judgment, the study put Tea Party members under a microscope.
This is fairly typical of those like the writers at The Times. It reminds me of a movie by Woody Allen, in which a boy fell on his head and temporarily became a conservative, subscribing to National Review and such. It took another fall by the boy to get rid of this problem. No argument, no examination of the merits of the ideas. Instead it is like some kind of virus one catches, not a set of ideas one might actually find intellectually compelling.
Zernike also quotes one Mr. Perlstein, associated with the survey, saying, “It is entirely predictable.” He was referring to what the Tea Party folks are thinking, doing, etc. Here is condescension for you! These Tea Party people are like robots, unable to think independently, freely, but instead are perfectly predictable, kind of like the weather and certainly not like we are, here at The Times, who have independent minds and think stuff through. Such people all reach the same conclusions, don’t you know, as those at The Times. But the Tea Party people, well they are dumb and cannot.
This is ironic, actually, considering that every time one reads a column by, say, Bob Herbert or Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, one can pretty much predict that the authors are going to be cheerleaders of every Leftist policy, foreign or domestic. The Left just cannot do anything wrong for these columnists. And Obama & Co. are uniformly brilliant except when they fail to spend enough of the taxpayers’ money on, for example, Keynesian policies such as stimulus packages. If it amounts to using other people’s resources for projects other people cannot have any say about, the team of columnists at The Times will mostly likely endorse it. No, but they are independent thinkers and not at all entirely predictable like members of the Tea Party.
The Times might want to stop this snooty elitism. Ms. Zernike and Mr. Perlstein might consider having a bit more respect for the people whose activities they cover and comment on. Maybe they will stop being so insulting. But it isn’t very likely. For the thinking at The Times, such as it is, seems to go this way: Those who disagree with the editors and columnists of The Times have to be wrong, couldn’t have anything of merit to contribute to public discourse. So there’s no need to argue with them, for example, or test their views for cogency, credibility and truth. No, that would accord those opponents of The Times’ views some measure of respect which, of course, we cannot have. (By the way, had The Times found Tea Party members uneducated and poor, you can be sure they would have been dismissed as pedestrian fools whose views again are not worthy of consideration.)
This is actually a ploy employed by hard core leftists since the time of Karl Marx. For Marx his opponents had nothing worthwhile to say because they were caught in a trap of class consciousness. The bourgeoisie just couldn’t help supporting capitalism, especially the right to private property, because it was in its economic interest which held it completely captive. So the way to cope was to liquidate these people, with their regressive, reactionary opinions. No need to make the effort to demonstrate that they were wrong about anything. They just couldn’t help themselves.
I do not think that many of those championing President Obama’s policies can imagine themselves being mistaken about anything and so listening to other than their pals and apologists is a waste of time. It is a historical necessity that the Obama viewpoint will triumph, not a matter of argument and analysis. What opponents say is, well, all entirely predictable.
