Tea Party Aftermath: What Now?

A little food for thought…

Now that the afterglow is fading, we’re left wondering what to do now that we have a nascent movement of sorts.  We must remind ourselves of what we’re up against.  I bring you MSNBC’s “coverage” of the tea parties, guaranteed to deeply insult and anger every conservative and libertarian within earshot.  Be sure to watch the whole thing, if you can stand it:

Neurologically deficient racist teabagging rednecks.  Wow.  Just…  wow.  I don’t even know where to start with that one. But I guess picking my jaw up off the floor would be good.  It’s shameful to think that the National Broadcasting Company would countenance such blatant hatemongering, but that’s the world we live in now.

The sentiment expressed there is not as uncommon as you’d like to think.  But in contrast with that outrage, the best summary of the tea party’s ideological significance I’ve seen has come from–get this–a Democratic strategy blog, appropriately named The Democratic Strategist.  Here’s the gist of it:

The on-the-scene reports by citizen journalists from Huffington Post and other web publications suggest that probably the largest single group within the tea parties were neither corporate Republicans, single-issue protestors nor conspiracy theorists… [The viewpoint of the protesters] is an authentically “grass roots” perspective rooted in a “common sense” understanding of economic affairs that arises from practical experience in the world of small business. The Americans who embrace this view have never read Milton Friedman or attended any formal lectures in their lives. Their philosophy is sustained by the informal exchange of ideas with friends, neighbors and co-workers and is derived from daily life in “the real world” as it appears to many average Americans.

At the core of this view are a cluster of ideas that can best be summed up as “pre-Keynesian.” It is an approach that is unified by the idea that that government should be run according to the same principles that apply to running a small business. 

The main ideas are:

1. Government spending to create jobs simply does not work. It can only create phony “make work” or “leaf raking” jobs and not “real” jobs that need to be done…2. Government simply should not go into debt; it should maintain a permanently balanced budget. This idea, which in previous generations was called fiscal responsibility or “sound finance,” is based on making an analogy between an individual household and the government…

3. Banks are visualized as essentially profit-seeking businesses like any other and not as an abstract “credit system” that provides “finance” or “liquidity” to the economy. In this view, the fact that banks’ particular business happens to be taking deposits and lending money does not entitle them to any special treatment…

4. Government regulation is seen from the perspective of a small businessman. As such it appears as a maze of annoying paperwork, licenses, permits, inspections, and so on. Since the 1970’s when the demands on small businesses – and particularly the paperwork required of them - increased exponentially, the view grew that many of these regulations were really created by government bureaucrats to keep themselves employed rather than as a sincere attempt to solve genuinely pressing social problems…

5. Taxes are seen from a very limited point of view — as money that is simply taken away from individuals by the government — and not visualized as part of a larger circular flow that returns in exchange services and a healthier society in which to live. The “common sense” notion simply is that “Taxes are my money, not the government’s money”.

I’ll give this guy credit–he’s much more perceptive than your average Democrat.  He clearly made a genuine attempt to understand the tea parties at their base level, rather than pick a few weirdos out of the crowd and extrapolate some kind of evil agenda based on mental deficiencies.  Granted, the focus of the piece is how the Democrats can win over the tea partiers, and as is typical of liberals, gives short shrift to the idea of common sense.  But I can say fairly confidently that if the Democratic Party were to affirmatively stand for the general principles of the tea partiers, well, I’d probably be making the switch right now.  I think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening, and a lot of the damage is already done, but that’s beside the point.

What interests me is what comes next.  It’s a long time until the 2012 election, and Obama played it smart by screwing us early–it gives everybody plenty of time to calm down and forget about it.  It’s up to the tea partiers to make sure we keep at it, taking to task both Republicans and Democrats for further abuses.  So how do we do that?  Let’s hear your thoughts.  If you attended SquareWon’s tea party in Tuscaloosa, tell us what you think should be next in the comments.

Just to keep myself motivated, I’ll be watching that video from time to time.