Tea Party Hangover

From Zanecorpwiki

There's lots one can learn about starting a political movement from the Tea Party. However, the Tea Party carries within itself the seeds of it's own destruction and it's members are destined for frustration.

The Tea Party is an ideologically driven movement who's policies are variously ill-defined, scattered, and naive.

Less taxes is great, but where are the cuts? Military spending is honestly the only clear and easy cut, but something that the Tea Party (en masse) never addresses. Cut "welfare"? Well, 69% of welfare goes to the elderly, 19% to the disabled (including disabled vets) which leaves only 12% to help the poor, who are the implied target of "welfare cuts". The predominant view that taxes are simply "lost" is childish. Consider the Scandinavian countries which simultaneously have some of the highest tax rates and highest trust in government. Clearly it's not taxes themselves that are the problem, but the feeling that we don't get our money's worth.

Cut deficit plus less taxes is just plain ignorant. The massive spending cuts which would be required to achieve both aims simultaneously would be politically impossible and very probably wreck the economy.

Less government and less regulation is naive. One can argue that we need to get rid of bad regulation, and that's a terrific conversation to have, but the idea that regulation itself is bad is, again, just ignorant. No regulation means I can open a combination paper mill and slaughterhouse in the middle of a residential neighborhood and instantly destroy the value of all the surrounding property. Regulation is necessary for property rights to have meaning.

Throw the bums out is probably the most universal and most sympathetic plank of the very loose Tea Party platform (if you could call it that). But what everyone almost universally fails to understand is that our system makes bums out of anyone. Our problems with inadequate and ineffective representation representation stem from our voting structure and electoral rules. Electing "anti-government" crusaders cannot have any long term effect unless they manage to fundamentally change how we elect representatives and the mechanisms therein are simply not well enough understood by general populace and are completely against the interest of pretty much all existing actors in the system. In other words: it ain't gonna happen. Not with just passion and undirected anger.

We the people is a pervasive meme within the Tea Party. You hear it all the time from Tea Party candidates as they're winning the primaries. Problem is they're winning because they were able to mobilize the vote within a very small part of the electorate. In the primary you can only get 1/2 the voters out at best (because only one side votes, and independents don't vote at all). Turnout is typically worse than general elections to begin with, so you can win handily with less than 10% of the people supporting you. To take this and make statements like, "The people have spoken" and "America is XYZ" based on such slim figures is either extremely ignorant or entirely disingenuous.

To be frank, I hope the Tea Party wins as many primaries as possible. It'll help keep the Democrats in power who, despite doing a terrible job, do a much better job on the job creation than the Republicans^{[notes 1]} and probably on the economy in general. In modern times, the Dems are also better on deficit (remember Clinton's surplus that GW Bush then turned into the biggest deficit since WWII?).

So, as far as that goes, you could say I agree with the Tea Party. I want less deficit and a government that does better by the people. Therefore, based on the evidence at hand, I want a Democratic government. At the same time, it would be good to put a scare into the "bums".

But most of all, I want the Tea Party to do well and even win some seats so I can watch the movement fly apart as they learn that actually governing is not as easy as complaining and that a set of contradictory and often ridiculous policies are completely unworkable both politically and for sheer fact that they're contradictory and ridiculous. It is only by letting the Tea Party share in power that they'll learn these facts, and it will be very entertaining to watch them do so.

That's probably overly harsh, and I don't mean to focus on the Tea Party in my scorn. Pretty much all any politics is good for now-a-days is as theater. A very expensive, sad, tragic theater. But, given what it is, we might as well get the most entertaining theater we can.