One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
In a new study, David Kirby and Emily Ekins document what many of us already know: both libertarians and conservatives have swelled the ranks of the tea party. But the numbers are welcome proof that the tea party phenomenon cannot be written off as just the latest and greatest way for the right's moneyed elites to rile up the rubes for election season. The tea party isn't a single movement, a single constituency, or even a single would-be realignment. It's a focal point for a number of different shifts -- the kind that take away the explanatory power of words like 'center-right' because the definition of the political center is being contested.
Libertarians and conservatives alike have been grappling over the past decade or so with a basic choice between a more top-down and a more-bottom up approach to governance. Independents who don't share the ideological commitments of devoted libertarians or conservatives have wrestled, in a different fashion, with the same thing. In addition to this ongoing debate about the direction of governance, there's a broad reconsideration of the appropriate content of governance. It's the kind of shake-up that makes for movements you can't pin down or pigeonhole. And it's evidence that the tea parties are the pointy end of a larger thrust in American politics away from the routine we've become accustomed to.
Helpful as they are in pointing this up, Kirby and Ekins' numbers run the risk of cementing the illusion that the tea party is an either/or affair, sharply divided between unreconstructed libertarians and unreconstructed conservatives. The truth is a much more intriguing mush in the middle -- as once-settled sets of priorities and principles are resorted in response to Obamanomics, and as voters without clear-cut ideologies continue to gravitate away from the offerings of the party establishments.
- Comment (8)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (2)
Comments :
Oct '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
This labeling thing is just too confusing. The article points out that "many of these activists...are unfamiliar with the word "libertarian". Well I doubt that they are confused about what they believe, they just don't need to label themselves according to someone elses criteria. Why is this so hard for politicos to understand? Many here on Ricochet would consider themselves "libertarian" and they are also clearly conservative, not one or the other. Why is it so important to catagorize people?
Edited on Oct 28, 2010 at 3:55pmJul '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
The flip side is that this is the Internet revolution. We have such ridiculously fluid arrangements for news and communications being assimilated into the society and augmented with new ideas constantly, that that silent majority Nixon cited so often has found a voice and the opinion vise cooperatively enforced by Big Government and Big Media and so roundly ridiculed from some view or another by most people I have run across over the years, has been supplanted by geographically disparate clumps and clusters of like minded souls finding common cause and consensus.
By the way, colleges and universities are next. The brilliant, motivated student and the tech savvy professor do not require the brick and mortar to get the job done in many cases. Science and engineering labs being an important exception.
These gatekeeper professions so stridently defending the speech codes and other anti-American authoritarianisms are being eroded.
The Tea Party approach of finding points of consensus across a broad population and flash mobbing the political process is just starting to gear up. 2010 is a practice run, baby's first steps. God I love this country.
Jul '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
We Libertarians always figured the public would come around eventually.
Just not in our lifetimes.
Thank you, Barack.
Jul '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
I think a lot of first time voters are, after this election, going to become involved at all levels of the American political system. That is, they are going to act like the citizens Benjamin Franklin was hoping for. The American problems have developed as the great center of the Country has let the left wing take over the levers of power, from the local school board through to the state and national levels.
So, I don't think categories like "libertarian" or "Conservative" or "Social Conservative" are applicable to this movement. Right now, it is quite properly focussed on throwing the bums out; and then cutting the budget in Congress. But experience will show that municipalities and states are involved in this mess, too. It is a great thing, to watch the greatest nation on earth awaken, and live up to its highest principles!
May '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
The last time the center was contested in American politics: 1992. Ross Perot did better than any third party candidate in memory by showing scary charts about fiscal problems (boy are we worse off now) and scare mongering about NAFTA. Obviously he lost that election. But the GOP House takeover came a couple years later. The center had maybe shifted, and that affected Clinton's triangulation.
My question is whether the Tea Party also disappears due to a combination of a) the people it elects to Congress betraying it and/or b) the end of the recession, or even another economic boom.
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
Libertarianism is closest to the classical liberalism that came from the enlightenment period which led to American conservatism.
Libertarians have the most right to claim the moniker of "conservative."
The rest are sects within the conservative philosophy (social cons, neo cons, Republicans). They have their place, but...
The Tea Party is a movement finally pushing the love of individual freedom Libertarians have held to the forefront of conservatism, where it was at the founding of America and where it belongs today.
I hope for a day when we no longer need the name Libertarian, as Conservatism will simply be thought of with the set of Libertarian ideals it traditionally held.
Starting with this definition:
"Conservatism is conserving the freedom of the individual from the trespasses of government and the trespasses of others."
Oct '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
Wouldn't a classical liberal be even closer to that classical liberalism than a libertarian? While such classical liberals may not have their own party like the libertarians, I do believe they exist, that they exist within the Republican party, and that they more fully embody the ideals that founded this country.
Oct '10
Re: One Step Closer to Grasping the Tea Party Realignment
Tommy De Seno: Libertarianism is closest to the classical liberalism that came from the enlightenment period which led to American conservatism.
· Oct 29 at 8:12am
From Wikepedia:
Libertarianism is the advocacy of individual liberty, especially freedom of thought and action. Roderick T. Long defines libertarianism as "any political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power [either "total or merely substantial"] from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals", whether "voluntary association" takes the form of the free market or of communal co-operatives.
… liberals and conservatives "typically do not take alternative positions on issues of equality and freedom. Instead, each side appeals to one or the other core values, as liberals stress egalitarianism‘s primacy and the social injustice that flows from unfettered individualism, while conservatives enshrine individual freedom and the social need for mobility and achievement as values "endangered" by the collectivism inherent in liberal nostrums." (Seymour Martin Lipset).
The above definitions make it clear that Libertarians would tend to be conservative in that they value the autonomy of the individual above the statist collectivism of the liberal.