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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Tea Party is a restorationist movement |
| 2010-03-17 |
| 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 anti–new 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 |
| #6 Communism, fascism, and socialism may all be termed collectivist systems in contrast to individualism. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-03-17 10:33 |
| #5 Obama and his ilk are not progressives, they are collectivists. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2010-03-17 10:17 |
| #4 However, every now and then the people who do engage in public business get too powerful, too overreaching, too corrupt, they awaken that population who say 'enough is enough'. We are not ruled. There is no consent. This is one of those times. They will be interesting times. Yup and indeed! |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-03-17 10:13 |
| #3 One view of the original American Revolution is that the objective at the beginning was a return to the autonomous colonies status [benign neglect] they enjoyed prior to the Seven Years War/French and Indian War. It was the actions of the government in London to impose authority and rule over the colonies after that war that created the agitations that lead to the conflict. What that set in motion is something we face today. One little small phrase 'all men are created equal' would ensure that no stability will ever happen and that chaos would be a reoccurring aspect of the American Democracy. Nature is hierarchical and territorial. The American concept flies in face of nature. It is the mutant form of social organization compared to the vast majority of others. There is no acceptance of a 'natural' set of governed and governing in the culture. When the society and system slide towards the natural side there is a reaction to it. There is a throwing out of the old order who've become comfortable and smug in thinking themselves the natural governing by deed, word, or actions. Most Americans want to be left alone to do their own thing, raise a family, or get on in life. They generally don't want to be part of a political process. However, every now and then the people who do engage in public business get too powerful, too overreaching, too corrupt, they awaken that population who say 'enough is enough'. We are not ruled. There is no consent. This is one of those times. They will be interesting times. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2010-03-17 10:03 |
| #2 Restoration, in this case, should be equated with "error correction", which can be categorized into groups: 1) Original error. Inherent flaws in the constitution, which have long been known. 2) Executive errors. The POTUS and VPOTUS need to be limited to acting only through senate approved cabinet officers, who can themselves be impeached. No "Czars", very limited recess appointments, memorandums or signing statements. No more takings of State lands by presidential whim. 3) Legislative errors. Mostly the 16th and 17th Amendments, the over-extrapolation of the 14th Amendment, the Interstate Commerce and General Welfare Clauses, and the delegation of authority to the bureaucracy. 4) Judicial errors. Legal precedents that have taken on a life of their own, far beyond their original intent, such as corporate civil rights, over-broad appellate authority, forced State appropriation of money and the use of special masters. Both civil and criminal legal reform, as well as structural reform of the judiciary. 5) Treaty abrogation, where such treaties violate US sovereignty. 6) Incorporation of such amendments that are needed to establish ideas now only in law, such as a War Powers and Posse Comitatus Acts. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-03-17 09:30 |
| #1 The Tea Party movement is a grass roots movement made up of Republicans, discontented Democrats, Libertarians, and independents. There are other groups that fall ideolgically within this rapidly growing movement. These folks do not want the hard-left, big-spending, central control-oriented direction of the current administration. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-03-17 09:21 |