New York Times house “conservative” David Brooks recently dismissed the Tea Party movement by comparing it to the New Left radicals of the Sixties. After remarking on the fondness of both movements for mass protests and street theater, he identifies their “core commonality” as a belief in “mass innocence”:
Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.
According to Brooks, this similarity leads the Tea Party to paranoia and nihilism:
Because of this assumption, members of both movements go in big for conspiracy theories. The ’60s left developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks — theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky. In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters.
Because of this assumption, members of the Tea Party right, like the members of the New Left, spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted. They worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks.
Because of this assumption, members of both movements have a problem with authority. Both have a mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment. Like the New Left, the Tea Party movement has no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation, when the federal leviathan is brought low.
So, only a belief that people are “pure and virtuous” can justify distrust of the elite, and resistance to Big Government? And, since people are not pure and virtuous, opposition to the designs of the elite always leads to paranoia, plus an appetite for wanton destruction? Damning the Tea Party movement for “hating authority” is like declaring the survivors of Jurassic Park to be anti-lizard extremists. This is nonsense designed to reinforce the boundless self-regard of snobs, and disguise the inherent failure and corruption of a system “moderates” like Brooks apparently believe they can fix through fine tuning.
It also demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the Sixties radicals. The cutesy title of Brooks’ essay is “The Wal-Mart Hippies,” but the Tea Party differs from the New Left in far more than its preference for big-box retailers over head shops. No branch of the Left has any faith in the purity and virtue of the people. Quite the opposite – they believe the people are greedy, vicious, stupid, and helpless. That’s why every aspect of their lives must be regulated and subsidized, under the wise guidance of a socialist elite… guidance which must occasionally be supplied at gunpoint. At best, a liberal sees the public as victims and dupes of Big Business interests, which can only be defeated by even bigger government. Left to their own devices, the proletariat tends to engage in poisonous activities like capitalism, and draw arbitrary lines against the power of righteous government, based on mindless reverence for the philosophy of dead white males.
The entire point of our Constitution is that people don’t have to be pure and virtuous to earn their liberty. Liberty is not a gift from the State, bestowed upon qualified applicants. Insisting on the restraint of government does not require naive faith in the virtue of citizens.
Statists mistakenly believe the economy is a zero-sum game, in which the prosperity of one means the poverty of others. They hold this belief so tightly that it leaves them incapable of processing evidence to the contrary. Even liberals with advanced economic degrees are reduced to babbling idiots in the face of increased Treasury revenue through reduced tax rates. There is one crucial ingredient to prosperity whose supply is fixed: freedom. It is not a “renewable resource.” Every power seized by the government diminishes it. Each tax and subsidy melts down more of our liberty, to be forged into more pipes for a monstrous system of political plumbing. The ominous leaking and shuddering of those pipes heralds the utter failure and collapse of the system.
There’s nothing paranoid about pointing this out. The Tea Party critique of banks and the Fed has far too much documentation to be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” The assumption that government is “pure and virtuous” has led us to ruin. The truth is that once it reaches a certain size, it becomes all but incapable of virtuous action. The precious commodity of liberty has diminished so much that any further extraction of it becomes agonizing – a matter of brute force instead of persuasion. You can ask a rich man for a dollar, but you must take it from a pauper. We have all become impoverished in the coin of freedom, and in order to make his health-care scheme work, the President demands our bottom dollar.
David Brooks, David Frum, Christopher Buckley, and other members of the “moderate” chorus want to define conservatism as marginal improvement of the self-replicating machinery of the State. They accept the founding principle of therapeutic government: faith in the power of intelligent politicians to carefully design an improved future, or at least cushion the damage from inevitable American decline. The only inevitability is the abject failure of the well-creased pants and first-class temperaments they adore.
It doesn’t take starry-eyed love for an imaginary, angelic population to see that American citizens, and the free market that sizzles between their independent desires and endeavors, hold solutions beyond the comprehension of our political class. Visceral hatred of authority is not required to see the ambitions of Big Government come at the expense of its just and lawful duties. The signature difference between the Tea Party protests of today, and the counter-culture protests of forty years ago, is that the Left was wrong then, and they’re wrong now.
A bitter rain from the approaching tsunami of total failure has washed the glamor away from their promises, revealing a grim engine that nourishes a few, while devouring everyone slowly. The path away from its gears and chains is a fundamentally conservative one… the conservation of liberty. Arrogant elitists make poor guides along that path. They keep looking over their shoulders, and dreaming of what a properly educated master could do with such an engine.
Cross-posted at Hot Air.
Please, someone discredit Hauser’s Law for me. Please. And I would prefer a qualified economist to do so. Ad hominem attacks need not be issued.
Oh, and Doc, you missed the most wonderful comparative: the New Left in the ’60s were fighting a Democrat-Party institution. At least the Tea Partiers have an antithetical ideology in power against which to focus.
@DOne:
I don’t know that I could disprove Hauser’s Law, and Hauser’s Law does not contradict anything that the good Doctor has said. Hauser’s Law says that since the Second World War, federal tax revenue has been ca. 19.5% of GDP regardless of marginal tax rates. That being the case, why shouldn’t we prefer low marginal rates to high ones, unless the explicit objective is to soak the rich?
Hauser’s law is really the observation that since WWII federal tax revenue has been generally equal to about 19.5% of GDP.
Do you believe Dr. Hauser miscalculated, or perhaps that the current situation has changed the observation?
Dr. Hauser’s observation says nothing about incremental reduction in liberty due to regulations and/or tax laws. It only addresses tax revenues. Nor does the observation address perceived unfairness in the tax code.
If you could clarify your comment it might be helpful.
Mark Sherman
DOne
It appears to me that you are comparing apples to oranges. A larger GDP will mean that the 19.5% collected is a larger amount of revenue for the Government. If lower marginal tax rates contribute to a higher GDP then nothing is wrong with what Doc said.
I guess that my contention is that, regardless of to whom the majority of taxes are applied, the income is always directly connected with GDP. The Doctor stated that lower taxes increase revenue for the government, the implication being that lower taxes increase the gross domestic product. There is far too much involved when determining GDP, and this implication is patently false. There are plenty of instances where GDP rose with tax increases and vice-versa.
“No branch of the Left has any faith in the purity and virtue of the people. Quite the opposite – they believe the people are greedy, vicious, stupid, and helpless. That’s why every aspect of their lives must be regulated and subsidized, under the wise guidance of a socialist elite… guidance which must occasionally be supplied at gunpoint.”
Best summary of our enemy I have ever read.
Thank you, again John
Dana
DOne wrote:
It has been my experience, that when anyone uses the term “Patently False” and then dismisses the argument out of hand, it means that they don’t have any good argument or proof to refute the claim, they just dislike it and want to not believe it, so they don’t.
It is an eloquent way of say “Nu-Uh!” and then sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “I can’t hear you, la la la la la!!!!”
When you attempt to refute what the Doc says, bring data.
@ CoolHand:
Ad hominem, ad hominem, ad hominem. A simple adverb-adjective combination manages to bring out the personal attacks. Yeah, well, you’re ugly, Luke.
The fact is that the GDP has increased (almost exponentially) every year since 1960. This growth occurred during the Great Society; this growth occurred during the Carter Administration; this growth occurred during the Clinton years. In fact, during Carter’s Administration, the GDP rose from 1.7 trillion dollars to almost three (granted, not adjusting for inflation). Still, even adjusted for inflation, Carter managed a 2.1% GDP growth rate during his term. Clinton had the benefit of the tech boom; although tax rates increased, the GDP grew 3.6% — beating out Reagan’s 3.5% rate increase. In fact, during the modern era, the GDP has grown best under Democratic Presidencies … Kennedy and Johnson each scored over 5% growth.
Let me qualify the previous … the first sentence should read “almost every year since 1960.” Recent events (and the years awaiting Reaganomics to kick in) saw some dramatic dips.
DOne wrote:
Perhaps you need a refresher on logic as well.
I did not insult or attack you, I pointed out in hyperbolic terms that your assertion was long on opinion and short on backup data.
[...] of Liberty Tue 09 Mar 2010 The Republican Heretic Leave a comment Go to comments Doctor Zero rebuts a dismissal of the Tea Party movement by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks dismisses [...]
@ CoolHand:
I disagree. You accused me of being closed-minded, and I am anything but. I followed with data; however, if you read Doc’s post, I am asking questions based on only a small part of his essay:
You accept this statement without any verifiable data … why not mine?
Doc does, however, follow up that statement with a fantastic metaphor. Damn he can write.
@ DOne
What’s your problem? Your eloquent albeit verbose and argumentative statements about GDP have nothing whatsoever to do with the article or Z’s statement. The fact is, it can be historically proven that tax revenues go down when tax rates go up and vise versa.
I recommend the Heritage Foundation’s article on “Historical Lessons of Lower Tax Rates”. http://www.heritage.org/research/taxes/wm327.cfm If we’re going to argue, let’s be at least be arguing about what he said, if you have another point to make, get your own blog.
DOne wrote:
Actually, the data backing up his premise is legion, and I have already reviewed it, thus I do not require reiteration here to accept the argument. I have verified it as true in the past and no new data has come to my attention negating it, ergo, it remains true now.
You wish to refute his claim as false. To do so, you must provide data to back up this new argument which refutes the earlier proof in a meaningful way.
You did not do that, and I pointed it out.
My conclusion about your wishful thinking/closed mindedness may or may not be erroneous, however even if I am wrong, the fact that your argument lacks supporting evidence is not negated by an error in conclusion on my part. Your assumption of such is indulging another logical fallacy.
@ Raw Hide:
As pointed out. I took only a smll segment from the Doc’s post because it was forwarded as a “given.” It is not a given. I have no problem with the Doc; I love his writing and enjoy his posts. Simply because I choose to voice some contention does not mean that I am here because I wish to incite.
However (and this is also @ CoolHand
, what I do have a problem with are ravenous followers who ignore my praise and launch into attacks against me, usually utilizing ad hominem assaults, because I have the audacity to disagree. What I do have a problem with are those that ask repeatedly for data and, if provided, just ask for it again. What I do have a problem with are those that believe, if a person has a contrary position, that they have a “problem.”
I believe that I clarified my earlier position. I believe that I gave the Doc much praise where it was due. I know that I gave statistical data when prompted, yet I am still asked to simply “go away.” If that ain’t closed-mindedness, I don’t know what is.
@ CoolHand:
Oh, and Cool Hand, your fallacious assertion of pondering tracts providing edification are summarily discounted considering the most transparent evidence of the patent truth that you simply cannot read.
Dr Z
I will pay for your subscription at the New York Times so that you can post your essay’s/rebuttals/thoughts/ambush/OP ED………….
You name it.
Let me know.
billskolnik@yahoo.com