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The Tea Party is a restorationist movement
Jonah Goldberg, National Review...The Boston Tea Party would make a strange lodestar for an anti-American movement. The tea partiers certainly aren't dropping out' of the system; if they were, we wouldn't be talking about them. And they aren't reading Marxist tracts in a desire to tear down the system' either. They're reading Thomas Paine, the founders, and Friedrich Hayek in the perhaps naïve hope that they'll be able to restore the principles that are supposed to be guiding the system. (To the extent they're reading radicals such as Saul Alinsky, it's because they've been told that's the best way to understand his disciple in the White House.) Restoration and destruction are hardly synonymous terms or desires. And maybe that's a better label for the tea parties: a political restoration movement, one that reflects our Constitution and the precepts of limited government.... ...The elite' the restorationists dislike is better understood as a new class' (to borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol). The legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942 that capitalism couldn't survive because capitalist prosperity would feed a new intellectual caste that would declare war on the bourgeois values and institutions that generate prosperity in the first place. When you hear that conservatives are anti-elitist, you should think they're really antinew class. Conservatives see this new class of managers, meddlers, planners, and scolds as a kind of would-be secular aristocracy empowered to declare war on traditional arrangements and make other decisions for your own good.' And that's why Obama backlash is part of the culture war. Defenders of Obamacare, cap-and-trade, and the rest of the Democratic agenda insist that they're merely applying the principles of good governance and the lessons of sound, sober-minded policymaking. No doubt there's some truth to that, at least in terms of their motives. But from a broader perspective, it is obvious that theirs is a cultural agenda as well. The quest for single-payer health care is not primarily grounded in good economics or in good politics but in a heartfelt ideological desire for social justice.' The constant debate over whether the European model' is better than ours often sounds like an empirical debate, but at its core it's a cultural and philosophical argument that stretches back more than a century. The restorationists reside on one side of that debate, while the Obama administration and the bulk of the progressive establishment reside on the other. And that debate is far from over.... Posted by: Mike 2010-03-17 |
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