Hubris and Fallen Columns

From the opinion pages of the WSJ  comes this withering synopsis of POTUS Obama's relentless (and ultimately self-defeating) pursuit of a Progressive Tranformation Of America (tm).  In short, it's turned out pretty much as you'd expect.

It really is extraordinary how opaque he was (and remains) to the practical and the political  implications of his actions, and thus how  utterly he has squandered what could have been a  most auspicious moment for him.

Oddly, my tear ducts register no activity at all.

"Recovery From Unusual Attitudes"

This started out as a reply to Mr Hengist's most righteous fisking of WaPo's Eugene Robinson, but it really started to look like a post unto itself. So here we are.

Robinson's blatherings are, alas all-too characteristic of the desperate delirium tremens which beset the Left as the rivets are systematically popped from the wings of their world-view ('Hey, nothing happened when we lost the first few! Guess we can ditch a few more...Wait, what's that wobble?...'): 

The European Super-Nanny is making like the Black Knight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" ("'Tis but a flesh wound!!"). All the Keynesian stimulus spending here at home is having pretty much the effect you'd expect from applying a defibrillator to a patient slipping into a diabetic coma. The Tea Parties are maddeningly/bafflingly failing to go away, lose elections, or start lobbying en masse for racial purity or putting Jesus on Mt Rushmore.

I almost feel sorry for them...between attacks of chortles and guffaws.

The dynamic has been the same for so long, that any change can only be seen by Leftists as pathology: The hard Left has dragged the Democratic party further and further to port, while a squishy-center-Right GOP has had rather a flaccid foot on the starboard rudder pedal. What force there has been in that countervailing direction has been so confoundedly conflated with Social Con issues that it's been unable to gather as much traction with a population which was not sufficiently attentive to the fiscal/federalist issues to see past the clouds of brimstone. And so the ship of state has swept in a leftward spiral so comprehensive as to be undetectable to the vast majority of folks who don't pay really close attention to such things. It's a situation eerily akin to that which resulted in the death of JFK, Jr, as his small plane swept in a long descending curve --utterly unnoticed by the seat of his pants and his untrained middle ear-- toward the choppy seas off Martha's Vineyard (link is to a really interesting article, with more levels of meaning and relevance than I'd expected to find for purposes of illuminating this small point. Worth your time).

That has now changed. With the Tea Parties, the small-government, fiscal-restraint message has risen to the top, at just the time when the public was paying attention (and yes, reciprocal causation is surely in effect here). It has outshone (though by no means obliterated) the SoCon channel, and assumed a position of a firm, energized counterforce to the sinister slippage that's dragged us so far off-true.We begin to see evidence of the emergence of that dialectic I've been prattling on about for so long. And it's about time!

Are there excesses of ideological purity on the Right? Of course. "Go ahead and default! Make my day!" is not a tenable position (if for no other reason that it puts the decision of what obligations will be met squarely in the hands of a POTUS who can hardly be trusted not to make those spending decisions such that they'll deliver the maximum hurt to people who will be inclined to blame the GOP). But how different is this from the cacophony of Progressive fantacism from the other side ("Hey, what we really need is a bigger stimulus...and a Single-Payer healthcare system...and Big Cuts to the military...and to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol..."). The trouble, it seems, has been that the zealots on the Left have had a seat at the table, while those on the Right were mainly yelling from the foyer. 2010 changed that, with the predictable result that things have gotten...well...unpredictable.

It's this latter point which seems to have been at the heart of S&P's decision to downgrade the US' creditworthiness from "Superdoubleplus Excellent" to "Merely Superb." Of course there's going to be unpredictability as the American political trajectory realigns itself. You can't alter the course of such an immense vessel and not expect a fair bit cavitation and wake turbulence. What S&P did was to issue a traffic advisory for the vicinity of that vessel, and one can hardly blame them for it....that is, unless one's entire narrative is predicated on the notion that there has been no bias, and so no need for a course correction (except maybe [further] to the Left). For such folks, these Tea Party Freshmen are the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, gremlins with crowbars, grinning on the wings, or whatever other metaphor makes you twitchy enough. Just a bunch of troublemaking hooligans, holding the stately State hostage for...somethingorother.

Yes, things are like to get a mite messy for a while, and investors (and voters!) should take note, and take precautions. But messy is what freedom is supposed to be. This is especially true during periods of transition, which we are surely in. It is the apparent direction of that transition which has Leftists (at least those who are paying attention) so nervous. And so they are bound to make the agents of that change into villains, and to try and tar the messengers who see the writing on the wall as mere graffiti artists. All in the hopes of planting the memes deeply enough to escape notice, that Left is Straight, Center is Right, and Right is Down.

But, to the great (and deliciously Schadenfreudig) consternation of Eugene Robinson and his like, more and more folks appear to be learning to fly by their instruments.

Oh, and Put It On the Children's Tab

[by Mr.Hengist]

Republicans are a bunch of terrorist hostage-taking criminals for trying to impose their ideological insanity upon the nation, according to the excitable and apoplectic Left. In actuality they failed to bring fiscal sanity to our budget process - caved - and the can has once again been kicked down the road. Europe is circling the fiscal drain, America is trying to catch up with them, and Eugene Robinson is mad at the GOP. Oh, and the sun rises in the East, and - there! - I'm done with trite clichés for the time being.

Let’s have a look at the talking points Robinson has regurgitated for us this time:

“The so-called analysts at Standard & Poor’s may not be the most reliable bunch, but there was one very good reason for them to downgrade U.S. debt: Republicans in Congress made a credible threat to force a default on our obligations.”

Well, no, they didn’t; that power rests solely with the POTUS. In the event that the Federal Government does not have enough money to pay all its bills, the POTUS has the legal authority and obligation to allocate what monies are available on a discretionary basis. In that context, Robinson’s statement could be taken to mean that he believes the POTUS would not have prioritized our debt obligations, but that would be giving him too much credit.

“This isn’t the rationale that S&P gave, but it’s the only one that makes sense.”

Like most Liberals, when their opposition states something which doesn’t gibe with their worldview, they discard what they’ve been told and substitute their own fantasies. I believe him when he says that S&P’s rationale doesn’t make sense to him, but the problem lies with Robinson, not S&P.

"Like a lucky college student who partied the night before an exam, the ratings agency used flawed logic and faulty arithmetic to somehow come up with the right answer."

In short, Robinson likes the result, but the reasoning is in conflict with his worldview, so he's openly discarding it but keeping the conclusion. The right answer, for Robinson, is that America should be downgraded because of the intransigence of the GOP, so long as that downgrade can be pinned on them. To the extent that S&P was critical of anything that might make the Left look bad - well, that's just crazy talk!

Take a moment to review the actual document issued by S&P. S&P’s rationale for the downgrade is that the deal won’t stabilize our fiscal situation, and with an additional $2.4T increase in debt, that’s correct. They also say that the differences between the parties are “contentious and fitful” and that the debt ceiling has become a political bargaining chip, and that’s also correct. As far as bridging the chasm between revenues and spending, S&P notes simply that the two sides can’t agree on spending cuts and/or tax increases. S&P does not take sides in that debate.

“And no, I can’t join the `we’re all at fault' chorus. Absent the threat of willful default, a downgrade would be unjustified and absurd. And history will note that it was House Republicans who issued that threat.”

Not exactly true, since the decision to default would lie with the POTUS. At any rate, history will also note that the POTUS threatened to veto any bill which did not extend the debt limit sufficiently to get us past the next election. To get him past the next election - and the Left has no problem with that.

“There is no plausible scenario under which the United States would be unable to service its debt.”

That's true - in medium term. Not servicing the debt would be a choice, not a necessity, and that choice lies with the POTUS.

“If political gridlock were to persist, our government would be able to pay bondholders with a combination of tax revenue and funds raised by selling more Treasury bills.”

Tax revenue alone would cover our debt obligations and avert default, albeit without enough left over to meet other obligations. Treasury bills could not be sold, however, unless they came from the Social Security “Trust Fund” in which case every T-note sold would lower our debt by equal measure, allowing for us to borrow that much more.

“And in the final analysis, as Alan Greenspan noted Sunday on `Meet the Press,’ the United States `can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that.’ I know this kind of talk is horrifying to Ron Paul and others who believe we should be walking around with our pockets full of doubloons, but most of us find paper money more convenient.”

... aaaaand, just like that, there it is. No apology, no regret, no pleading for the possibility of considering the necessity of doing the unthinkable. That last-ditch seawater-on-the-reactor cut-off-your-leg-to-save-your-life nuclear bomb of fiat currency mismanagement is casually put on the table with snide contempt.

Sure, the Treasury could simply create as much money as we owe and pay it off that way, and if it really were no big deal, why isn't Robinson wondering why we haven't done it already? $14T in the hole? Clickety-Clack, the Treasury can create that amount. Heck, why stop there? Why not turn that minus sign into a plus sign! Why not fill our coffers with $140T and fix this deficit problem for the foreseeable future?

The answer is this: “printing” our way out of this would rightfully be considered a default, both by the rating agencies and the rest of the world. It would literally destroy our economy, and, by the way, we’d never be able to borrow again. The result looks like Zimbabwe, and here, Robinson floats the idea as a viable alternative.

Eugene Robinson: charitably speaking, you are an idiot.

“What happened this summer is that Republicans in the House, using the Tea Party freshmen as a battering ram, threatened to compel a default.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Aside from the repetition of the false assertion that the Congress could force a default, Robinson has the dynamics of this completely inverted. The Republicans did not “use” the Tea Party freshmen; the Tea Party freshmen held firm and forced the Republicans to get a better debt deal. He writes in the WaPo, but does he even read it?

“More accurately, they demanded big budget cuts as the price of raising the debt ceiling. If the Senate and President Obama did not comply, the Treasury’s access to capital through borrowing would have been cut off.”

Well, one could have simply said so, but what’s a Liberal opinion piece without throwing up partisan hyperbole?

“The government’s cash flow would have been slashed by 40 percent, leaving not nearly enough to fund essential operations, pay entitlements and also service the debt. Somebody was going to get stiffed. Paying interest to bondholders could have been given priority over competing obligations such as salaries for our people in military service and Social Security checks for retirees. But for how long?”

OK, so did the House Republicans threaten to default or was default always an option of the POTUS? As Robinson admits here, it was always an option. Social Security, on the other hand, was never threatened; as I described above, the “trust fund” – which has in excess of $2T – is guaranteed convertible into U.S. dollars and allows for an equal amount to be borrowed through the sale of regular Treasury bills. Sure, it exchanges one IOU for another, but the SS recipients would get paid. In fact, we could do that and not touch tax revenues at all, for a while.

That, by the way, is the answer to, “But for how long?” For a while, until we can get more tax revenue and/or cut our spending. A better question would be, "How, by Crom, did we get to the point that 40% of our spending has to come from borrowing?" There's a reason this keeps getting called "unsustainable." It might be a debate worth having whether we should increase taxes or not, but when our elected officials keep finding new entitlements to grant (as noted below), it's easily demonstrable that no amount of taxation will ever sustain the nanny state they envision.

“S&P, however, gave a host of largely bogus reasons for its action. Why am I not surprised? This is a firm that aided and abetted the subprime crisis — and the devastating financial meltdown that ensued — by giving no-risk ratings to dodgy securities based on mortgages that should never have been written. The firm’s credibility is spent, as is that of the other ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch.”

The reasons S&P gave for the downgrade were far from bogus, but Robinson is correct in that the ratings agencies were complicit in the financial meltdown. However, the assertion that S&P’s “credibility is spent” is contradicted by the ensuing drop in the market. Obviously not, then, eh?

“Initially, S&P pinned the downgrade on the sheer size and weight of the mounting federal debt. Treasury officials noticed that S&P had made an error in its calculations, overstating the debt burden by a whopping $2 trillion. This discovery negated the ratings firm’s rationale — so it simply invented another.”

Reading this, you might be led to believe that those numbers alone formed the basis of S&P's rationale for a downgrade. Not so; Robinson is outright lying here. I've already linked to the original S&P report and it's worth reading. What's really more compelling here is that this “mistake” appears to be anything but a mistake. Here’s what appears to have happened: S&P used actual budgeting numbers vs. the Administration’s having used CBO numbers – and the CBO uses assumptions dictated by the WH, and those assumptions are completely implausible (The WH numbers assume that baseline expenditures grow with a nominal GDP increases of 5%/yr while inflation sits at 2.5%.) This is what Liberals are calling a “math error.” S&P revised that part of the budget analysis as the Feds implicitly threatened to strongarm S&P by holding hearings.

“Instead of basing its argument on economics, S&P made an ill-advised foray into political analysis. In its `revised base case scenario,’ the firm assumed that all the Bush tax cuts will remain in place past their scheduled expiration at the end of next year — even for households making more than $250,000 a year. But Obama vows not to let this happen, and S&P apparently fails to understand that after the election he will be in the strongest possible position to stand firm.”

It's amusing to read Robinson chastise S&P for making "an ill-advised foray into political analysis" when his own political analysis is so deeply flawed, and then to see that he in turn has no qualms in blundering about on his own ill-advised forays into economic analysis. You’ll recall that, the last time around, Democrats wanted to keep $298B of the $366B in “Bush” tax cuts. The Dems also promised to eliminate the Doc Fix as a part of the “savings” of Obamacare, but then reneged on that in a matter of months. Really, when you consider all the things POTUS Obama said he’d do, or not do, and then ended up doing the opposite – well, one can hardly blame S&P for a lack of faith. Heck, even in the midst of this Mexican hatdance around the fundamental problem of unsustainable entitlements the Obama Administration created a brand new entitlement.

“Obama should have made clear from the start that if necessary he would take unilateral action, based on the 14th Amendment, to ensure there could never be a default.”

Actually invoking the 14th Amendment for this purpose would have precipitated a constitutional crisis and, if his own party didn’t have control of the Senate, would surely and rightly have led to his impeachment. What’s more, the validity of any T-bills issued under such circumstances would have been of dubious authenticity and would therefore have commanded a high premium for the risk of their turning out to be worthless. Another excellent plan, Robinson.

Whittle Boils It Down, Part Six: Immigration, Assimilation, and the Rule of Law

Here's the Sixth part in Bill Whittle's excellent "Firewall" series on the core ideas of the Tea Parties. Part Five dealt with gun rights, and was the usual cool, rational tour de force, and I do recommend it. But, in my view, it lies a bit to the side of the main thrust of the series, which is to shine a clear light on the dizzying succession of absurdities which are leveled at the Tea Parties by their determined, well-funded adversaries.

The Tea Parties are a heterogeneous assemblage of  groups, still very much finding its voice and finding its feet. They contain a fair share of flakes and philosophers, psychos and statesmen. They differ broadly on methods and on messages. They engage in their fair shares of far-sightedness and folly. They are still evolving. As such, they are easy pickings for those who would "pick their target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it." It's easy enough to pick and decontextualize the dumbass things that are said and done within established political entities, with lobbyists and press handlers and a measure of message momentum. To take a stew like the Tea Parties, still in full rolling boil, and dip the fork of opposition research into it, one is bound to come up with more than one unsavory ingredient.

All of the abject nonsense about racism, xenophobia, theocratic aspirations, and domestic terrorism has either dropped into the pot from fringe elements who are broadly denounced from within the Tea Parties themselves...or have been slipped into it from without. I can only get up so much of a head of steam about the foolishness which comes out of the mouths of some Tea Party adherents. I could really live a whole lot better without the selective harvesting of these mal mots, and their use as cudgels, but if someone said 'em, there's no use hiding 'em. It's the introduction of slanders spun of whole cloth which really chaps my chalupas. One of the real biggies, the great, steaming, nitrate-rich piles of pure felgercarb, is this whole bit about racism.

One may, of course, differ with the small-government, free-market, decentralized politico-economic model of the Tea Parties (the one thing they all have in common). One can, of course, hold to a model of greater intervention in the economy by a more robust centralized government. But all of this non-sense about xenophobia is simply not in code of the Tea Party program. If anything, the meritocratic opportunity society which the Tea Parties envision is one which leaves zero room for the identity politics which form a far more fertile patch of soil for the undue emphasis on differences whose excessive extension leads into the rank recesses of racism.

It is to this last point that Whittle speaks in this latest vid. One of the recurring themes in the Tea Parties' discourse is one of push-back against illegal immigration, and against those government policies which --in effect or by intent-- abet it. Naturally, among Transnational Progressives, any mention of protecting National borders is at best distasteful...at worst, it is a kind of nativist provincialism which is treated as interchangeable with xenophobia. The cult of multiculturalism will not brook any talk of assimilation, treating it as some Borg-like attempt to erase the essence of the soul of the somethingorother. They would have us replace the "melting pot" with a very busy salad.

The problem is that all of this is beside the point. That point is that one of the chief functions of a Nation-State is to guard the borders which, in large part, define it. It is to reinforce the membrane around the organism of State, and thus to preserve the integrity of that entity with respect to its surround. A cell with an overly porous membrane (or none at all) simply melts into a patch of protoplasm, indistinct and quite dead. Say what you will about the Nation State as a concept (sigh, I guess that includes you, Mike), but so long as it exists, it must preserve a certain structural integrity, which includes the regulation of passage across its borders. Ethnicity has nothing to do with this, except inasmuch as given ethnic groups may (lamentably!) be statistically (though by no means essentially) associated with the sorts of failed and failing states from which people show a tendency to want to emigrate, with the US as a prime destination. But (and this is the central point) that ethnicity is wholly incidental to the question of whether their quite legitimate grievances with their countries of origin entitle them to carry with them some of the lawlessness that they strive to escape, and to import it into this Nation by the sheer act of slipping into it extra-legally.

There are whole shadow infrastructures which subtend the passage of illegal immigrants into this country, vast criminal enterprises which I would flatter by referring to them as merely amoral. Emotional appeals about poor families, hoping to make a better life must be held up against clear-eyed acknowledgments of the brutal, lawless cartels which pad their clandestine balance sheets by flouting the legal structures of this Nation and marching those families across the frontier in the dead of night. An insufficiently guarded border is like one big broken window in the neighborhood. It signals a laxity and decadence which invites exploitation like a wounded seal in a school of sharks. The national security implications of poor border enforcement are obvious (or should be!). But there are subtler issues afoot here, issues having to do with the level of order which a Nation can assure its citizens (not so great for the people of border states, who are urged to avoid certain areas so as not to run afoul of well-armed Coyote caravans), and with the value of labor (materially deflated by the presence of an entire underground economy of desperate people willing to take less than a pittance for jobs which would otherwise have to compete for workers in the full light of day).

The leaky bottom of the labor market, as far as I've been able to discern, is the main point of contention within the Tea Party ranks when it comes to illegal immigration. It speaks directly to the integrity of the marketplace as a mechanism for assigning value to economic activity, and the distortions of that marketplace where the value of labor is so unbalanced by a vast pool of undocumented workers, pulling that value artificially downward. Throw in the whole bit about the government failing to act on its Constitutionally-mandated charter to enforce the borders, and there's a whole lot of principled ground for the Tea Partiers to stand on with regard to this issue, and not a bit of it has to do with racism. Fancy that.

Now, I would be the first to be attacked from some quarters of the Tea Parties (and no, not because I am Hispanic. Sheesh!), in that I do support some kind of mechanism for bringing many of the diligent and law-abiding illegal immigrants in out of the cold...though not without penalty, and not in a way which disadvantages those who have striven mightily and waited long to secure legal residency or citizenship. But such measures would be meaningless in the absence of robust border enforcement, and a national will to expel those who game the system and/or commit crimes while they're here (aside from the one about being here in the first place, that is). If this way of thinking appears racist to some, then I submit that their definitions of that word cry out to be revisited.

Anyway, here's Bill's take on the matter:

Will on the Limits of Predictability

Here's a nice meditation by George Will in Newsweek, a glimpse of a glimpse of the fringes of the sheer complexity of the ever-shifting topology of the global economy. Commenting on the ideas of Robert Weissenstein, a chief investment officer in Credit Suisse Private Banking, Will highlights “the enormous iterative impact of everything we hold and do.” He points to the unanticipated consequences of seemingly unrelated innovations and how they create (and destroy) opportunities in a manner reminiscent of Burke's splendid series, "Connections."  It sounds what could be a healthily cautionary note for zero-sum, fixed-"pie" static-model economic thinkers with a mind to tinker with the workings of the marketplace in an effort to control it.

The oft-cited example of this unpredictability is the devastating effect which the advent of the automobile had on the buggy whip industry ("Think of the jobs!!"). The point of the article is the non-linear, unpredictable downstream effects of events and innovations, driving new growth, even as they annihilate previous growth drivers. It's the global economy as a dynamic and evolving landscape, in which dynamic and evolving things live. And die.

It is no more predictable than were the consequences of increasing amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere, billions of years ago, which killed off virtually all of the primordial anaerobic life forms that made up the vast bulk of the Earth's biosphere. It was a Disaster! But, of course, aerobic life forms were able to utilize and dissipate energy far more effectively, leading to greater diversification and complexification, ultimately producing the spectacularly successful dinosaurs...

Complex systems like organisms and species and economies are like that: they are inherently unpredictable, dancing always on the edge of chaos. And that's where evolution happens, on the margins.

If we let it, such can be a profoundly humbling perspective on our efforts to predict and control, and on the hard limits with which those efforts will inevitably collide.

I suppose "that's why we have a Tea Party."

Whittle Boils It Down, Part Four: On Natural Law

At last, the fourth in Whittle's superb series on the core concepts of Tea Party-style Conservatism. As usual, Bill states his case in a cool, rational, amiably non-confrontational manner, articulating these eminently sensible ideas in a gently persuasive style which befits their profound reasonableness. As with previous entries, it clocks in just under ten minutes, and is well worth every second:





Now, as someone well-steeped in Post-Modern academic thought, with its hermeneutic approach to texts (broadly defined), I'm disposed to be wary of appeals to "Natural Law." This is not a skepticism which I am inclined to repudiate fully. As a non-theist, it would be bad faith for me to posit some transcendent ontological status for even the most "self-evident" of epistemological constructs. If there is no Divine Firewall behind our concepts, they are, in the final analysis, all relative.

That being said, however, there are legitimate areas in which it is sensible to behave --as mindfully and humbly and self-critically as possible-- as though there were bedrock under our feet. For example, yes I am free to abandon my family and take off across the country to Find Myself. For me to sit here and say that I cannot do this would be bad faith. However, my liberty, my personal freedom as a choice-making agent is but one of the variables that enters into this decision. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that I don't want to do this (because I am deliriously happy with my family, and far luckier than I have any right to expect that I have it), the simple fact is that such an exercise of my freedom bumps up against the needs and feelings of others, and thus would bring about consequences which I deem adverse out of proportion to the advantages I might glean from such a self-serving journey of discovery. So, I choose to act as though this choice were not on the menu. Indeed, the very notion of contemplating such a step feels absurd. Although, in the strictest sense, this position is a conclusion, it is sensible to behave as though it were a premise.

Similarly, when Whittle makes reference to those "Truths" which we "hold to be self-evident," there is a part of me which cannot help but respond with a hearty "Who says?" After all, I don't fall into the "endowed by their Creator" camp. But let's look at a couple of the truths he is talking about: The rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," are construed as emanating not from the State, but from the intrinsic nature of humanity. Further, it is the role of the State to protect these rights, and not within the power of the State to bestow (or abridge) them. The right is similarly posited as being self-evident to freely enter into contracts, within the bounds of laws which protect the liberty and property of others, and without the fear that those contracts will be abnegated by political fiat. It is eminently sensible to depict these rights as transcendent and true, even though history is replete with examples (many still extant!) of the freedom of humans to behave otherwise. The advantages which derive from treating these "truths [as] self-evident" far outstrip those of leaving them on the deconstruction block.

The concept espoused by the Tea Parties that individuals are free to pursue their interests within a free-market system, and that the State's power to intervene in this marketplace should be robustly curtailed is frequently mischaracterized as "greed" and "selfishness." This could not be further from the truth. Indeed, it is the converse view (i.e., that it is within the power of the State to declare something --like, say, health care-- a "Right," and to forcibly extract the energy of the marketplace to fulfill that right) which smacks more of vampirism than altruism, however high-minded the intent behind it.

Whittle makes reference to the fact that corporations are currently sitting on immense cash reserves, rather than investing them and using them to create jobs. This is an observation which is not-infrequently used by critics of free-market capitalism to indict that system, and to posit the need for the State to step in and create and enforce mechanisms for the "equitable" distribution of those resources (e.g., via taxation). It's a fair-ish argument, but too narrow a view. For it would be very much in the interests of businesses to plow their cash reserves back into the operations of their enterprises, and to grow and add value to them (and, in effect, to the economy as a whole)...if they could be confident that their efforts would not stand to be thwarted by the operations of a State which could, by the exercise of political (that is, force-backed) power, act to tap into that value for the sake of the "Right" du jour (and de jure).

The conclusion/premise of the Tea Parties is that the energy which is currently being held off-line is trapped by an all-too rational fear of the overreaching expansion of the public sphere --via political power-- into the arena in which that energy might be liberated...if only the "Natural Law" of individual liberty and the relatively unfettered operation of the marketplace were allowed to hold sway. It is the unpredictability of political processes which creates an environment in which the most rational choice is to hoard capital, rather than unleash it. By contrast, it is the predictability of contract law and a constrained and frugal State which creates incentives to take financial risks for the sake of potentially rich rewards. In the final analysis, it is within the power of private enterprise to throw such caution to the winds, and take its chances that its investments will not be deemed low-hanging fruit for the fulfillment of the State's hunger for energy. They are free to do so, and it would be bad faith to say otherwise. But then they would have to look their stockholders in the face when their balance sheets were raided by those who deem them public property.

As Bill would say, "That's why we have a Tea Party."

Whittle Boils It Down, Part 3

Here's the third in the excellent series by Bill Whittle on the fundamental ideas which animate the Tea Parties (note: neither race nor religion enter into it at all). This time, the subject is the nature of wealth and its creation. (see here for Part One, and here for Part Two).




Once again, this is nothing new for those who grasp even the most rudimentary concepts of free-market economics...and that's pretty much the point: there is nothing particularly novel or radical about the basic tenets of the Tea Parties, however hard a dedicated cadre of spin-sters may be working to paint it otherwise. The 'kernel' of the Tea Party code is as elementary and intuitive as the transaction between two trade partners, both of whom walk away from a voluntary exchange of value with the sense that they got the better of the deal. Wealth is created, Whittle calmly and amiably explains, by the creativity of producers, who add complexity (or information, or value) to the world through their inventiveness and industry...then proceed to multiply that value via free trade.

It is the removal --to the greatest extent feasible-- of Government interference in the operation of this immensely powerful engine of wealth creation which is the main animating principle of the Tea Parties. Government is understood as a necessary set of negative feedback loops in the vast cybernetic edifice of the economy, governing the operation of that system to prevent its collapse into chaos. But an excess of negative feedback will stall and stultify the operation of the system, gumming up the works and diverting its energy into a great bureaucratic heat sink.

This is the principle which is so strongly opposed by adherents of the Liberal, Keynesian model of strong public-sector involvement in the operation of the free market which they so profoundly distrust. Now, it's clear that I have some pretty strong opinions on the topic, but I will not sit here and arrogate to myself some God's-eye view of what is correct (my positions on these things, were you to drill down to specific policies,  would probably engender a hefty dose of annoyance from both sides of the debate). But the beauty of the Tea Parties is that they have focused the attention of the GOP on these core questions, attention which it has been justly lambasted for allowing to be diverted by the K Street culture of irresponsible spending and creeping corruption. Despite the myriad distractions and smoke-screens which have been thrown up in the face of American voters with respect to these matters, the essence of the Tea Parties is the restoration to primacy of these elemental questions of where wealth comes from, to whom it belongs, and what is to be done with it. It really is as simple as that.

And, when you burn away the epiphenomena, when you tune your mind to the signal hiding in the noise, what emerges is a clear choice between incompatible visions of how an economy and a Nation should operate. Such clarity has been sorely lacking from this conversation for far too long, and far too many of the wrong people have been benefiting from its absence.

In that sense, the Tea Parties have already created considerable wealth for us all.

Whittle Boils It Down, Part 2

Shivering a bit in my hoodie. I'm going to miss this deck-blogging thing; sipping Jameson, a little Chopin over Pandora, and only the stars for proof-readers. Winter makes me feel like a night watchman for Nature.

I'm braving the chill, though, to bring you the anticipated 2nd in the series by commentator Bill Whittle on the core tenets of Tea Party-style Conservatism. As with the first part, Whittle makes the case with simplicity, humility, humor, and an easy aplomb which eschews any but the barest whiff of demagoguery. It is two for two in the area of dispelling the noxious fog of disinformation and spin which has so stubbornly attached itself (or rather willfully been attached) to the Tea Parties, and the beliefs of their supporters.



In addition to his characteristically clear elucidation of political principles, Whittle hits on themes of complexity and distributed, evolutionary processing which are near and dear to my heart.Whittle does indeed channel Hayek here (as pointed out by Ed over at Hot Air) on the prohibitive information barrier between Central Planning and the indescribably complex topology of something like even a relatively simple economy...let alone that of the US.

However, one need not take recourse in such dusty volumes to find the sense in this vid's point about the preferability of distributed, federalist, free-market decision-making over Central Planning. Mr.Hengist recently turned me on to Orbit At Home, which I plan to set into motion on  my home machine tomorrow.  Like SETI At Home, and a host of other distributed computing projects, Orbit uses the power of large numbers of processors, working snippets of a problem in massively parallel fashion to converge on solutions with a nimbleness and horsepower which leaves even the most powerful centralized supercomputer in the dust. In the case of Orbit, the task is the computation of the orbits (get it?)  of large numbers of potentially Earth-impacting Solar System objects.

The US economy is obviously even more complex a problem than the dance of celestial billiard balls. More bodies in motion. In just over two weeks, the American end users will have some deep thinking to do about how they want to use their clock cycles.

Half-Koched

For a while now, the blabosphere and Facebook status-klatches have been sporadically abuzz with the story of the wealthy, conservative Koch brothers. Supposedly they've been busily at work manipulating public disgruntlement by diligently, quietly seeding a little astroturf garden called the "Tea Parties."  The story has never felt especially credible, given the 'epidemiological' patterns of the TP movement's efflorescence, from Santelli's rant, on outward. It just felt too organic for such claims to hold much water with me.

An amusing little editorial by Andrew Ferguson, in Commentary more or less echoes my initial reservations about the story, and provides more context. It deals with the style of meme-weaving which lends itself to the kind of conspiracism that's become such the stock in trade for this administration and its backers:

The story of the Koch brothers and their involvement in politics, unknown as it is to most readers, is undeniably worth telling. But mere interest isn’t the reaction that ThinkProgress and Mayer, who is as much a party apparatchik as a reporter, meant to provoke. This is five-alarm journalism. “In many places,” Mayer told Maddow in a back-scratching interview, the Tea Party movement “has been considered a spontaneous uprising that came from nowhere.” In fact, it is merely one of the Kochs’ “stealth attacks launched on the federal government, and on the Obama administration in particular.” Maddow summed up the theme of top-down manipulation: “Tea partiers who attended these rallies, particularly the early ones, were essentially instructed to rally against things like climate change by billionaire oil tycoons.” 

Now, as the editorial points out, the Koch brothers have hardly been shy about their political positions: public financial records, not to mention public appearances...and even one run for VPOTUS on the Libertarian ticket are kinda hard to square with any attributions of attempted stealth!  Nonetheless, the brothers' perfectly above-board contributions to a group which shared their clear political proclivities were reported by "Think Progress"as though they were late-night dead drops of envelopes stuffed with unmarked bills and coded instructions.

But such is the perfectly consistent belief system of the collectivist on proud display. The very notion of the spontaneous emergence of a political phenomenon is anathema for those who maintain that humanity can truly advance (or "progress") only through the deliberate action of duly-designated elites.

And, of course, the irony that the heavily Soros-backed Center for American Progress should be the source of this story is apt to be altogether lost on those who've hitched their wagons to the Statist star. Pretext of principles, indeed!

But Star Chambers and Secret Groves have always been the preferred provinces of those who harbor an unnerving skepticism about the capacity of people to come to their own conclusions without being managed from the shadows...or from the Capitol. Since the Tea Parties arose, they have been: catspaws for the GOP, fronts for racist organizations, and Trojan horses for social conservative groups. Now they're a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries. Must be quite a challenge for the CAP "idea factory" to have to re-tool its assembly line so frequently!

Quoth Ferguson:

One mark of the paranoid style in American politics, Richard Hofstadter wrote in his famous essay, is its concern with “factuality,” a piling up of random details to create a coherence that reality itself can’t provide. Journalism of a certain sort becomes a convenient instrument of the paranoid partisan. “The paranoid’s interpretation of history,” Hofstadter wrote, “is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will,” an “amoral superman” who “manufactures the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.

With the Kochs, the American left gets two amoral supermen in one. Mayer’s article, and the larger campaign it’s a part of, is meant not only to alarm its audience but to soothe it as well. Any Democrat unnerved by the rise of the Tea Party movement will find it comforting to learn that it’s a giant confidence trick. The belief requires both a deep cynicism about one’s fellow citizens and a touching credulity about the ease with which they can be manipulated. All those angry, badly dressed people shouting into megaphones on TV: they’re not evil, they’re just stupid. [Hofstadter link added]

A charitable characterization of Progressive thought is that it believes humanity can be remade, perfected by a benevolent and comprehensive manipulation of its environment in order to foster the development of its highest potentials. For one who holds such beliefs, the idea that such large numbers of people can be so thoroughly hoodwinked and herded must at some level be a hopeful one. After all, if they can be prodded over to the Dark Side so easily, then they can be just as easily coaxed back into the light, right?


This endless cavalcade of narratives which opponents --on the Right and Left-- have hatched to try and fathom the Tea Parties resembles nothing more than the twitchiness of a species in response to the appearance and adaptive mutation of a rival species. One might imagine the reactions of Neanderthals, perfectly comfy in their lush valleys, to the arrival of those bald, skinny Homo Sapiens with their silly big heads...

[Shamelessly and extensively edited 10/12/10, to correct grievous violations of proper syntax and other late-night crimes against the English language]

Late update (3/29/2011):  Here is a lengthy, excellent account of the Koch brothers' history, and the evolution of the ginned-up, Outrageously Outraged campaign to smear and demonize them. Worth a read.

Whittle Boils It Down

In a soft-spoken, eminently reasonable tone, one of my favorite commentators, Bill Whittle, of ejectejecteject fame, lays out the fundamentals of the free-market, small-government philosophy which animates the Tea Party movement. Kinda old hat for those like myself who support that philosophy and movement.  But the concision and lack of demagoguery with which he makes the case will make viewing the vid a very well-spent ten minutes or so, whether you are a supporter or --even moreso-- if you are one whose exposure to the Tea Parties' ideas is limited to the very deliberately and disingenuously promulgated narratives of "racism" and "greed."




It is unfortunate in the extreme (no pun intended) that candidates like Christine O'Donnell and Carl Paladino have lurched onto the scene and made it so easy to mischaracterize the Tea Party movement as a whole with their missteps, shenanigans, and outright wackiness (but, it should be noted, somehow the hopefully-soon-to-be-unemployed Alan Grayson has managed to not tar the entirety of Liberalism with his nauseating antics...).

Items like this  vid are essential if the real terms of this conversation are going to have a chance to make their way out to an electorate with the clearest set of choices to make in altogether too long.

The Tea's a-Brewin'

Nice article in the WSJ, which articulates much of what I have been thinking about the influence of the Tea Parties on the American political landscape. Important graf:

Much will depend, of course, on which tea-party favorites actually win in the November general election, but a likely outcome of all this will be a Republican party more to the right, and a Democratic Party more to the left. "It's going to be a bipolar Congress," predicts Kenneth Duberstein, White House chief of staff for President Reagan.

At first glance, the notion of such bipolarity conjures images of gridlock and chaos. But thus does evolution work. It is a messy business, fraught with pain and turbulence and extinctions and dislocations.But it is a spectacularly effective engine for cobbling fitness from the staggering dance of environment/organism co-adaptation, the wrenching improvisational composition of blind variation and selective retention. The mess is the message.

As the Tea Parties impose selective pressures on the entrenched GOP establishment from the very soil below the grass roots, the elephant is forced, ponderously and reluctantly, to evolve or die, and with it, the whole of the political ecosystem through which it moves.

Much is made by the Democratic commentariat about the "Civil War" taking pace within the GOP. Fair enough, and we've certainly heard that language before, when Liberals want to sound a triumphalist note (and I'm not just talking about Iraq here). But just as important here is the internecine strife taking place within the Democratic party, as it faces what looks to be a sound drubbing, come November. As the factions of Dems who view the emerging Tea Party insurgency as a call to shift all the more shrilly to the Left have it out with those who see the need to let the Blue Dogs have their day, so is the donkey compelled to adapt, lest it become a mule.

All this excites me greatly. There are those who decry the retrenchments, Left and Right, and bemoan the "loss of the Center," lamenting that it is out of this center that "true" governance takes place. But they are missing a very crucial point: The "Center" cannot hold. When the poles of political thought become cross-contaminated by the efforts of our would-be leaders to be all things to all people, the result is an unhealthy loss of clarity. This brings about a blurring of the focus which animates the Centralizing/Federalizing dialectic which has held in its uneasy balance the very dynamism which has kept the Founders' grand experiment on the bleeding edge of civilizational evolution since its inception. The "center" is what emerges from the push-pull of competing visions for our Republic, the "big government, small citizen/small government, big citizen" tension out of which arises an ever-changing synthesis which is able to keep pace with shifting circumstances.

Before us today is the emergence of a purifying blast of clarity on both sides of this dialog. And, as they thrash it out, the promise of a properly divided government is, at long last arising. The "center" will wrench itself into being as the moribund, accommodationist oligarchies of both parties are forced to weather the withering blasts from the sharp, hungry purists on both sides of the political divide. They will be forced to ply the same waters, held to account by the voters should they fail to find a way to man the oars and get the ship of State back underway.

EDITED: 9/21/10 for typos.

Sauce: Goose, Gander

Just sat through 11 minutes of video (posted and duly re-posted on the Facebook walls of some friends) in which an Obama-supporting chap interviewed a succession of Tea Partiers, highlighting a certain lack of resolution in their data. Pause for popcorn:



Sorta like if Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments were produced at MSNBC, right? Not the most stellar performances of wonkery from the lumpen non-wonkers.

But it reminded me of something. Let's see....



Oh yeah! That was it.

So, what's the take-away from this little exercise in compare-and-contrast? Well, that would kinda depend on  your chosen set of goggles, now wouldn't it? Is it an indication of how much more [insidiously] effective Right-Wing media outlets are in promoting a set of talking points? Is it a sign of the Left-Wing Media's emphasis on emotionally salient but factually-unfurnished memes? Is it a simple matter of (Camera One) Tea partiers' brainwashed vacuity? (Camera Two) Obama supporters' blinkered adherence to the cult of their Dear Leader's personality?

Is it an indication of how the granularity of much-needed data gets sand-blasted in an environment of entrenched partisanship, such that individuals on  both sides (not to mention all the other possible "sides") are deprived of the means (or even the vague sense that there is a need) to flesh out their wafer-thin comprehension of Very Important Stuff?

And where in this process might we situate the act of promulgating one of these clips in the absence of the other?

Man Bites Dog: Honest Reporting From WaPo on Tea Parties

And the title is where the snark will end. It was refreshing in the extreme to see this editorial by the Washington Post's Robert McCartney on his personal investigation of a Tea Party rally.

I went to the "tea party" rally at the Washington Monument on Thursday to check out just how reactionary and potentially violent the movement truly was. 

Answer: Not very. 

Based on what I saw and heard, tea party members are not seething, ready-to-explode racists, as some liberal commentators have caricatured them. 

Some are extremists and bigots, sure. The crowd was almost entirely white. I differ strenuously with the protesters on about 95 percent of the issues. 

Nevertheless, on the whole, they struck me as passionate conservatives dedicated to working within the system rather than dangerous militia types or a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Although shrinking government is their primary goal, many conceded that the country should keep Medicare and even Social Security. None was clamoring for civil disobedience, much less armed revolt.

Clearly, the author has differences with the Tea Partiers. This is not a problem; dialog on the issues does not require complete agreement (that's why they call it 'dialog!'). What is most edifying about this piece is how it openly looks at the degree to which the worst stereotypes put forth about the movement hold up to scrutiny. McCartney shows the ability to disagree with the Tea Partiers on the issues without the need to marginalize and misrepresent them. Instead, he went and found out for himself. He talked to people. He questioned them on the issues, but he also soaked up their vibe. Then he reported honestly on what he found, without shady selective emphases or narrative-supporting innuendo.

Not much more to say on this: it was just nice to see a journalist in the MSM do his job with the integrity and forthrightness which enables his readers to engage in genuinely critical thinking. He does not take it upon himself to villanize or slander, in order to preemptively foreclose on people's access to the variables which will guide their thinking on the matter, just because he might not like some of the conclusions to which they might come.  We could do with quite a bit more of this. Please do read the whole thing.

The Shape of Things to Come?

It's been said  (I'm looking at you, Mike) that there is no material difference between the Demoblicans and the Republicrats, and that they were both pushing the Republic (or Democracy. Whatever) toward the abyss, albeit at fractionally different paces.

It's hard to argue that there's been as much of a clear difference between the parties as one would like, or as would be healthy for a national dialectic out of which a healthy set of workable compromises could emerge. There hasn't. So the calamitous deficits and debts being raked up by the Democrats is harder for the GOP to attack without getting chuckles, given the less-calamitous-but-still horrid free-spending days of their own turn at the tiller...and the till.

Then along comes someone like the new NJ governor, Chris Christie, whose avowed purpose is to trim, or, rather, carve the fat from the bloated budget of New Jersey (and, yes, the irony is not lost on me...unlike Christie's navel. Har-har). Contrary to the most cynical projections of what would happen when he took office, he seems hell-bent on doing just that, going after some of the most ornery and entrenched interest groups in the Garden State like a fiscal weed-whacker. He is not making a lot of friends in the corridors of power...but he appears to be genuinely thick-skinned about it (somebody please stop me!). Here, in the Examiner, and here in the WSJ Christie is presented as someone who has made it his job to speak to the voters as adults, who are called upon to make hard choices for the health of their State. Imagine that!

I can't help but see the hand of the Tea Parties in the electoral victory of someone like this, and in polls like those in the primary race between the centrist Charlie Crist and the Tea Party Anointed and genuinely impressive-seeming  Marco Rubio. Even the stunningly unexpectedly successful new MA Senator Scott Brown --hardly a TP type-- caught some of the energy of a wave which, for the time being at least seems to be surging higher every day. Even the establishment GOP has been forced (albeit not always in an above-board manner) to adopt language which is in line with the TP's insistence on adherence to fiscal restraint, federalist decentralization of small, responsive government, and free-market solutions over Beeg Goverrnment Prrograms (/Boris and Natasha).

And if nothing else the Tea Partiers are practical: they won't be fielding Tea Party candidates where a credible GOP contender walks the proper talk (they remember Ross Perot). More to the point, they don't have to. As their message disseminates to a wider and wider swathe of an increasingly disenchanted electorate, the GOP is going to feel quite acutely the need to align themselves with that zeitgeist. And, contrary to the gleefully histrionic ululations of the Left about how such "Purity Tests" signal the imminent Balkanization and demise of Conservatism in America, this is a good thing. The Tea Partiers are becoming the king-makers, without aspiring to the throne.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the imposing figure of Chris Christie, with sharp humor and considerable momentum, continues to work to clean up the immense mess left behind by decades of Democratic profligacy. And he really doesn't care what stands in the way of doing the job for which he was hired:

As Christie puts it: "It should've been dealt with years ago. It wasn't. ... If people don't like it after four years, they can send me home." 

More like this, please.

Indeed. 

Crashing

In a sadly predictable development, adversaries of the Tea Party movement have hatched a scheme to "infiltrate" Tea Party events, and deliberately disseminate and perpetuate their carefully-nurtured stereotypes of those groups. Specifically, they aim to "Propagate [the Tea Parties'] propensity for paranoia and suspicion...we have already sat quietly in their meetings and observed their rallies." UPDATE: The page is gone, leaving only an appeal to buy a tee shirt to support the "Crashers" founder. Yah. I'll get right on that.

Side question: if you actually have enemies sitting in your midst, posing as friends while collecting intel for an attack against you, do you still qualify as 'paranoid?'

Anyway, they go on:

"Whenever possible we will act on behalf of the Tea Parties in ways which exaggerate their most unappealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public's opinion of them. We will also use the inside information that we have gained in order to disrupt and derail their plans."

Well, it's certainly inspiring to see people who are so confident in their arguments and in their own ability to persuade others to see things their way. I mean, seriously? This is the most constructive use for these people's time? This is the political equivalent of kicking over another guy's sand castle because yours came out lame...and everyone knows it.

Bob Owens, over at Pajamas Media executes a proper take-down of this misbegotten tactic (and of its not-entirely un-pathetic creator):

Smears and deception have been part of politics from the beginning, but the proud, brazen nature of those who embrace this sort of activity is a direct affront to the sort of civic involvement we need to have in a healthy republic. These are vile tactics by any moral standard, championed by individuals and groups that care not for debate and dissent, but instead thrive on creating a climate of mistrust and fear. Perhaps this is the kind of world they desire to live in, providing they have the power in that world. 

One has to question the character of individuals involved in such an effort, and their trustworthiness in any endeavor. They create stereotypes and perpetuate them for media consumption in order to demonize and alienate their fellow Americans from one another. And to what end? 

The crashtheteaparty.org website exists for one reason and one reason only: to stifle the voices of those with whom they disagree and to render mute a rising chorus of dissatisfaction with a government that is acting in ways that deeply distress a growing majority. It is a censorship plot. It is an attempt to stoke anger and distrust, and it is as insidious and distasteful to the hearts of free men as any book-burning or pogrom.

Emphasis added to shine a light on the crucial factor here: the misguided souls who engage in these sorts of  eliminationist antics believe, like the Operative in Serenity, that they are tasked with creating a Better World. Toward that noble end, they believe, even such wanton acts of subversion of the national dialog are justified. After all, if you feel that you have a pretty good bead on how the world ought to be, and the only thing standing in your way is a noisy rabble of fly-over denizens in bright tee shirts and tri-cornered hats, then no holds are barred. Goes to show even the most noble aspirations are not immune to the blight of arrogance, and the bullying which it spawns.

One can grant that there are pure intentions behind their opposition to the Tea Party vision of small, accountable, fiscally responsible and federalistically decentralized government. But even if they start out with a good-faith vision of a government which takes upon itself the duty to provide for its citizens and to oversee the distribution of this Nation's wealth in a just and equitable fashion, even if they truly feel that theirs is the more humane and responsible course for this Republic, these particular individuals have ended up in a far darker place. The moment they arrogate to themselves the right to deceptively discredit their political opponents (rather than engage them in issue-oriented, constructive and informative debate), they have ceded not just the high ground and the low ground, but the upper levels of the sewer system to boot. They have declared, in effect, that they have too weak a case to risk making it forthrightly...or that the American public is too stupid to comprehend it and make the "right" choice if they did...which is not an especially promising indicator of their faith in the democratic process or in the citizens for whose welfare they purport to stand. Standard Scenario: Imagine if a group of Tea Partiers had created a web site promoting plans to attend Coffee Parties with the intent of covertly discrediting them [Sidebar: I'd just as surely be slamming them if they pulled this nonsense]...it is worth reflecting for a moment on the fact that this has not occurred.

I derive no small comfort from the ease with which this puerile plot was pulled into the purifying sunshine  (owing, in large measure, to the amateurishness and sloppiness of its founder). It's a twofer, really: not only will it very likely fail (no doubt despite the best efforts of a host of friendly media outlets to slather the airwaves with decontextualized 'reporting' of these schmucks' shenanigans), but it will expose the sheer intellectual and moral bankruptcy of these Teabag-slamming agents provocateurs.

It would be a delicious irony and a fitting cautionary tale if it should come to pass that the very public Epic Fail which all-but certainly awaits this bunch of juvenile party-crashers should play a part in the crashing of their Party.

Steep In This

Last Tuesday, it was with no small amount of dismay that I read this editorial by the New York Times' David Brooks, on the subject of the Tea Party movement.  Here's a sample of the tone of the thing:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

And here:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

 Get the picture? One the one hand, you have the "Educated Classes," on the other, a "fractious" rowdy rabble of reactionary nay-sayers. Brooks' position is characteristic of the near-monotonic position of the mainstream media with respect (or rather, its lack) to the Tea Party movement, and of the supposed lack of credibility which any "reasonable" person should ascribe to it. Depending on who you ask, the fiscal conservative, small-government message of the Tea Parties is either a thinly-veiled front for a theocratic SoCon agenda, or else it is a feeble-minded rejection of all that highfalutin'  college-boy/girl doubletalk...or, still more objectionable, it is a fetid fog rising from the dingiest backwaters of the Confederacy to block the uppity aspirations of the Nation's first Black POTUS.

And, of course, if the evocation of these memes should fail to dissuade the rare fence-sitter from putting forth a good-faith effort to understand what these people are on about, there is always the tried-and-true technique of middle-school locker room mockery. After all, who would want to speak up at any of the best parties in defense of "Teabaggers?" (huh-huh. huh-huh)

All this talk of "educated classes" makes me very uncomfortable. The clear implication is that one needs to be in possession of academic accolades, a member of the most rarefied reaches of the upper stratosphere of the intelligentsia in order to be entrusted with the business of governing a Republic of the people. I strongly suspect that the response of many of my hypothetical readers to the previous sentence would be a hearty "Yeah? And?"

I have a BA from NYU, and a PsyD (Doctor of Psychology) from a well-known institute in Pennsylvania. Big Deal. These help me to ply my trade and realize my dreams, in much the same way that a certificate in HVAC enables one to realize his or hers. I’m plenty educated, thankyouverymuch. And I am very favorably disposed toward the Tea Party movement.

This insistence that our Leaders possess august academic credentials is predicated on the idea that those leaders are expected to Do Things, to manage and craft society like a massive intellectual exercise, and that this is the proper role of government. I used to believe this myself. I subscribed to the Philosopher King model of leadership, and so believed that power should not be entrusted to anyone of lesser intellectual/academic heft. As little as five years ago, the very notion that someone like Sarah Palin should be greeted with anything but a snort of derision would have been anathema to me, as it currently is to those who --consciously or no-- still feel our Nation would be best served by a Philosopher King.

But I’ve evolved to a very different place since then. I have come to believe that the proper role of government, as willed into being by the Founders of this Nation, is not to Do Something, but to stand aside, doing as little as possible, while the mass of free individuals pursue their ends and deploy their hard-earned capital as they see fit. We do not need a Philosopher King…or any other kind of king (or queen) for that matter. We need competent administrators with the humility and common sense to remove unjust obstacles to the people's pursuit of liberty’s fruits, protect their rights to liberty and property…and then to stay the frack out of the way. This is what the Tea Partiers advocate, and they have made it abundantly clear that they are not beholden to any given political party in their campaign for these goals.

A useful dialogue may be had on the question of whether a society is best-served by a member of the anointed academic elite, or by a savvy pragmatist of a more 'populist' stripe. The answers to such questions will tend to hinge on the whether one espouses a Conservative or a Liberal view of how resources and power should be distributed for the optimal functioning of this society (I keep coming back to this post on the day after Election Day 2008. I beg the reader's indulgence; I think it's about as clearly as I've ever articulated the difference between these viewpoints). Unfortunately, that is just the sort of conversation which is drowned out in what has become a clash of dueling caricatures. Liberals default to a largely unquestioned stance of haughty, elitist derision, and Conservatives to one of clamorous anti-intellectualism with more-or-less equal (and equally maddening) frequency, and we all lose.

For those who might still be reading, I refer you to this spirited and unusually even-tempered defense of the Tea Parties over at The Daily Beast. Key grafs:

It is hardly surprising that in times like these there should be a large, angry, populist movement. But populism does not conform to the standard left/right divide, and in different circumstances it can go either way. (A rather good Greenwald column makes this point, too.) The populist’s personality is driven as much by wounded pride as by economic concerns, and so he resents the cultural elitism of the liberal elites, including their patronizing desire to help him, as much as the economic elitism of the wealthy.

Yes, the populists fear and hate the big businesses and Wall Street; but—and this is the heartening thing—they have not let this turn them against capitalism and the free market. They seem truly to have taken in the point, long emphasized by libertarians and others, that big business is not the same thing as capitalism or the free market, that it is in fact often their enemy. Perhaps the Obama administration has finally driven this point home, as it has been an object lesson in how the party of big government is really in bed with big business, giving it all the bailouts and favors. So by this reckoning, the Tea Parties would be a very serious development in which anti-big business forces would finally join with anti-big government forces to create a genuine free-market party that would maximize the opportunities of the little guy—like this small-business owner from California. (Note, this YouTube clip has nearly 250,000 hits and 6,000 comments.)

This video makes me emotional, because this woman represents an America that Tocqueville would have lauded. I will take her any day over the “educated class,” the bureaucratic mollusks and the defeatist sad sacks in Washington. I do think the Tea Partiers are political amateurs, but the content of their politics is deadly serious. The professional politicians will dismiss them at their peril.

Indeed.  History has yet to determine if, despite the considerable centrifugal forces which exist in a loosely-constituted confederation of populists, the Tea Party movement will succeed in focusing the energies of the GOP toward the presentation of a coherent and positive alternative to the centralizing tendencies of the Progressive camp...or whether it will dissolve into warring tribes of variously "Pure" Conservatives who are unable to make a distinctive case to the American people about their vision for our Republic. There is a Rorschachian quality to the Tea Party movement, and much can be gleaned from any given individual's reading of its leaves.

Personally, I find that terribly exciting.

EDIT (1/14/2010) in last paragraph to make it, you know, make sense.