Why the Tea Party is toxic for the GOP

[TampaYankee]

Why the Tea Party is toxic for the GOP

By Michael Gerson Michael Gerson is conservative columnist for those not familiar with him.)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

(Michael Gerson is conservative columnist for those not familiar with him.)

So the "summer of recovery" swelters on, with Democrats sun-blistered, pestered by bottle flies, sand in their swimsuits, water in their ears. Jobless claims increase, Republicans lead the generic congressional ballot, and George W. Bush is six points more popular than President Obama in "front-line" Democratic districts that are most vulnerable to a Republican takeover. Still, Democrats hug the hope that Obama is really the liberal Ronald Reagan -- but without wit, humor, an explainable ideology or an effective economic plan. Other than that, the resemblance is uncanny.

Yet the Republican Party suffers its own difficulty -- an untested ideology at the core of its appeal.

In the normal course of events, political movements begin as intellectual arguments, often conducted for years in serious books and journals. To study the Tea Party movement, future scholars will sift through the collected tweets of Sarah Palin. Without a history of clarifying, refining debates, Republicans need to ask three questions of candidates rising on the Tea Party wave:

First, do you believe that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional? This seems to be the unguarded view of Colorado Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck and other Tea Party advocates of "constitutionalism." It reflects a conviction that the federal government has only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution -- which doesn't mention retirement insurance or health care.

This view is logically consistent -- as well as historically uninformed, morally irresponsible and politically disastrous. The Constitution, in contrast to the Articles of Confederation, granted broad power to the federal government to impose taxes and spend funds to "provide for . . . the general welfare" -- at least if Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings are to be believed. In practice, Social Security abolition would push perhaps 13 million elderly Americans into destitution, blurring the line between conservative idealism and Social Darwinism.

This approach undermines a large conservative achievement. Despite early misgivings about Social Security and the Civil Rights Act, Ronald Reagan moved Republicans past Alf Landon's resistance to the New Deal and Barry Goldwater's opposition to federal civil rights law, focusing instead on economic growth and national strength. A consistent "constitutionalism" would entangle Republicans in an endless, unfolding political gaffe -- opposing, in moments of candor, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the federal highway system and the desegregation of lunch counters.

A second question of Tea Party candidates: Do you believe that American identity is undermined by immigration? An internal debate has broken out on this issue among Tea Party favorites. Tom Tancredo, running for Colorado governor, raises the prospect of bombing Mecca, urges the president to return to his Kenyan "homeland" and calls Miami a "Third World country" -- managing to offend people on four continents. Dick Armey of FreedomWorks appropriately criticizes Tancredo's "harsh and uncharitable and mean-spirited attitude on the immigration issue." But the extremes of the movement, during recent debates on birthright citizenship and the Manhattan mosque, seem intent on depicting Hispanics and Muslims as a fifth column.

There is no method more likely to create ethnic resentment and separatism than unfair suspicion. The nativist impulse is the enemy of assimilation. In a nation where minorities now comprise two-fifths of children under 18, Republicans should also understand that tolerating nativism would bring slow political asphyxiation.

Question three: Do you believe that gun rights are relevant to the health-care debate? Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle raised this issue by asserting that, "If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies." Far from reflecting the spirit of the Founders (who knew how to deal with the Whiskey Rebellion), the implied resort to political violence is an affectation -- more foolish than frightening. But it is toxic for the GOP to be associated with the armed and juvenile.

Most Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement are understandably concerned about the size and reach of government. Their enthusiasm is a clear Republican advantage. But Tea Party populism is just as clearly incompatible with some conservative and Republican beliefs. It is at odds with Abraham Lincoln's inclusive tone and his conviction that government policies could empower individuals. It is inconsistent with religious teaching on government's responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak. It does not reflect a Burkean suspicion of radical social change.

The Democratic political nightmare is now obvious and overwhelming. The Republican challenge is different: building a majority on an unstable, slightly cracked foundation.

michaelgerson@washpost.com

See original article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/24/AR2010082405001.html

[TampaYankee]

The Tea Party is a poison pill for the GOP I believe and that is fine with me. In fact, needed. I wish to see the GOP revert more to classical conservativism and dump the neocons, moralistic nannyism and politics of ethnicity. That is change I can believe in. (I can fantasize anyway.)

Of course, the Tea Party could be a poison pill for the country, if the electorate makes bad choices as it did in 2006.

[MsGuy]

Cheer up, TY. A few birth pangs are to be expected:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

----

See, AS, and you thought I'd never learn how to quote poetry. HA!

[AdamSmith]

See, AS, and you thought I'd never learn how to quote poetry. HA!

Bravo!

But lord have mercy. Did your selection have to be quite so apt?

Eek.

[TampaYankee]

----

See, AS, and you thought I'd never learn how to quote poetry. HA!

Just where do you guys hang out?

[MsGuy]

Bravo! But lord have mercy. Did your selection have to be quite so apt?

Eek.

Somehow that poem leaves me with cold chills down my spine and a sick feeling in my stomach. Kinda like a mouse must feel being stared down by a cobra. Requiem of sorts for Western Civilization, I think.

----

TY: Just where do you guys hang out?

AS was kind enough to make an effort to educate me in the mysteries of Wallace Stevens last summer. Alas, I was left as baffled as ever.

When confronted by obscure metaphors packed 3 deep into elusive similes packed into a poetic conceit I missed in the first place, my brain just packs its bag and checks out of the hotel.

[AdamSmith]

Somehow that poem leaves me with cold chills down my spine and a sick feeling in my stomach. Kinda like a mouse must feel being stared down by a cobra. Requiem of sorts for Western Civilization, I think.

I don't think I have heard it put better than that. When Yeats decides to say what's really on his mind, not much to do but duck and cover.

...For love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

And nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

AS was kind enough to make an effort to educate me in the mysteries of Wallace Stevens last summer. Alas, I was left as baffled as ever.

Well, that is the whole thing about Stevens. Do you think I ever have any idea what he is really talking about?

When confronted by obscure metaphors packed 3 deep into elusive similes packed into a poetic conceit I missed in the first place, my brain just packs its bag and checks out of the hotel.

I think you about nailed it in your reply to my posting of Stevens's 'The Owl in the Sarcophagus':

'...Wall-eyed, reach for nips!'

Imagine what it's like reading him while ingesting even stronger substances.

[AdamSmith]

Just where do you guys hang out?

In the troposphere.

[lookin]

Poetry in the Politics Forum. Pinochle in the Buffet.

At least Lucky knows his Place.

(Sorry, guys, I've been waiting weeks to use that line, and August is nearly over!)

[AdamSmith]

Poetry in the Politics Forum.

Pinochle in the Buffet.

The cadence of your reply put me in mind of something, but I just could not recall exactly what.

Finally it came to me: one of the Wizard of Id's incantations to his demon in the vat...

Frannis in the jim-jam!

Frippin on a filtz!

Frappis in the frannin

With a frim-fram jiltz!

[AdamSmith]

Frannis in the jim-jam!

Frippin on a filtz!

Frappis in the frannin

With a frim-fram jiltz!

Besides remembering that the comic strip spelt it 'philtz,' I just recalled the Vat Spirit's response:

'You want that on an LP, or a single?'

[lookin]

I thought surely a good night's sleep would get this out of my head.

No such luck.

Anyone needs me, I'll be frippin on a philtz.

[AdamSmith]

Anyone needs me, I'll be frippin on a philtz.

Not much consolation, but...it is still infesting my head likewise.

If you find a way to get rid of it, let me know.