Tea Party: Silent No More

Continued from here.

Let's return to the 1960's, when Richard Nixon famously courted what he called America's Silent Majority. He insisted that there was a vast swath of the American electorate that was center-right in its proclivities that was largely ignored in political circles in favor of a more vocal minority.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and so too did the loud trumpeters of the Left get the media coverage. 

Richard Nixon attempted to give voice to these heretofore undetected voters, but met with mixed success. Ultimately, it was his Southern Strategy (attracting an entirely different type of voter) which bagged him the White House in 1968. The Silent Majority itself never really fell for Mr. Nixon's dubious charms, nor for Gerald Ford in 1976. But it existed, and a good case can be made that the Christian Right was a major part of it, finally coming out of the closet in the late 1970's. 

In my opinion, the Tea Partiers are the remainder of the Silent Majority, finally awakened from their slumbers by the political seismic shocks visited on America by President Obama.

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 Like their evangelical brethren 30 years before, the Tea Partiers were content to go to work and raise their families, and had little interest in politics beyond the occasional Presidential election. Even when they were galvanized into politics by extraordinary events, like the healthcare debates of 1994 or the terror attacks of 9/11, their attention and enthusiasm quickly waned in favor of the real stuff of life, things like car payments, college tuition, retirement, church, family, community, and work.

But in the 2000's, politics would not take a holiday.  America's war against Jihadist Muslims was serious and important, and demanded their attention. The economy continued to be a sore spot, and all of this was exacerbated by the ever greater rhetorical excesses of the Democrats, who, smelling blood in the political waters, swarmed around Washington with a lust for power that would not be denied.

In many ways, the 2008 election was more about irritation than anything else. When you are trying to concentrate, the constant buzzing of a bee is distracting. The more you try to ignore it, the more you can't ignore it, until at last exasperation brings out the fly swatter. So too, with the 2008 election. For 8 long years, politics would just not go away, and the American electorate finally rose up and angrily swatted the Republicans aside, hoping against the evidence that they could peacefully return to what they considered their real life.

But it was not to be. Like their evangelical brethren of the 1970's, politics would not leave them alone.  In the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression itself, when their life concerns were at their most worrisome, President Obama embarks on the Great Transformation of America to European-styled social democracy. National Healthcare, Cap and Trade, higher taxes, exploding entitlements, nationalization of entire American industries, annexation of State sovereignty, demagoguery of ordinary economic activity, all of this and more the President and his Chicago coterie rammed into the national debate within months of taking office.  And every single one was a direct and transparent assault on these silent people, their homes and their lives.

Now, it is true that each and every plank the President intends to put down in the Ship of State is manifestly harmful to the very economy he is supposed to be fixing.  And, foreign policy-wise, it is also true that Obama intends for the new Ship of State to stay docked on America's shores, as he takes America into a new isolationism that has been rejected by American voters in every election since World War II. These are potent new political issues, and Tea Partiers oppose them all.

But these are not the essence of what drives the Tea Parties.

What drives them is that with all this transformative change, the President seems to be saying, "It's now going to be politics all the time. So get over it."  In a capitalist, free society, resources needed for family and community are gained via voluntary association, cooperation, and competition with others. However, in a social democracy, resources are distributed by the State in accordance with the relative political power of constituency groups. Therefore, in Obama's America, politics and political power will be the keys to providing for yourself and your family, and your life must become political and vice versa. 

But, this is precisely why these people have been silent all these long years: they don't want to do politics all the time. What they want is to be left alone to tend to their own affairs. The paradox is, desiring to repel the forcible entry into their lives of such a radical political agenda, the Tea Partiers have jumped headlong into the political fray -- and done so with a great passion, in some of the most spirited public demonstrations this country has ever seen.

Street demonstrations have always been a unique tool of the Left. Mainstream America doesn't like such public displays, preferring to make their contribution to the national debate in letters to editors, kibitzing over backyard barbecues with friends and family, or in the quiet confines of the voting booth. But faced with obstinate politicos in Congress and the White House who refuse to exit their Leftist echo chamber, mainstream America - the Tea Partiers - have taken to the streets, determined to be heard.

And despite being ignored by the Major Media as a fringe minority, they have been heard. Their rousing voices this past year sent a palpable chill up the political spines of the Democrats, who in their desperation resort to laughably pitiful smears, libels and slanders in response. Their public outcry slapped a moribund Republican leadership awake, a leadership that was all but ready to surrender to the Liberal-Progressive agenda because Reagan conservatism was supposedly dead in American politics.

The most intriguing aspect of the Tea Party movement, however, is that its central political focus seems to be a re-newed Constitutionalism in American politics. For most of the life of this Republic, whether or not the Constitution allowed the government to do something was a potent political issue in elections. Even as late as the 1930's, it was a given that the Hoover Dam could not be built by Federal fiat, but had to be done via a compact between the various States involved. But the relevance of the Constitution to any particular political debate these last 30 years or so has fallen by the wayside, as the Liberal-Progressive infection over the last century has diminished the notion that there are Constitutional constraints over anything the Federal government wants to do.

I daresay that if a Hoover Dam were proposed today and you could actually get the attention of our Representatives in the midst of the earmarks flying around the House, any question of constitutionality would be met with derisory laughter. Our own Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, gave just such a response when questioned about National Healthcare.

The Obama agenda is a final blow of 100 years of Liberal-Progressivism, intended to shatter forever the Constitutional framework that served this country so well for two centuries. Whatever the merits of European-style social democracy, it does not resemble in any way the Constitutional framework of a limited Federal government, robust State sovereignty, and enumerated rights of citizens over against them both. Instead, social democracy arrogates near unlimited power to the Federal government over the lives of Americans, in the name of some higher good of society, as defined, of course, by the political class. As such, it is manifestly unconstitutional.

The Tea Partiers are clear about this, and their clarity is heartening, at least for this old soldier. I revere the Founders and the founding of this great Republic, and look with hope upon the possibility of an American renewal, a re-founding, if you will, of this great country, upon the principles of the most revolutionary documents in history, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.