Best answer I have heard to the question, who is Glen Beck?

"Beck was a guitarist for the Yardbirds. He was incredible." -Anonymous

A Long-Expected Tea Party, Fin

Part 5: Conclusions?

“Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” –Joseph Schumpeter

To quote my father, it might be time for a third party, but the Tea Party isn’t it. They’ve been called a fringe movement that will quickly die away. The sheer numbers it was able to muster suggest that the story might be more complicated than that. The Tea Party certainly did not invent the concept of calling the President Hitler and making signs that say he should be impeached. The Tea Party is significant because it boasts many more members and is treated much more seriously by mainstream groups than were any extreme leftists during the Bush years, however. The most commonly cited reason for this is that they are racist, deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a black president, of a country where the concept of white privilege is quickly eroding. This may be true for some folks, and the Tea Party definitely does attract some extremists, but I believe the reason for its popularity is more obvious. It’s the economy, stupid! We enjoyed relatively good times economically under Bush; we had a recession but people got their jobs back and we blamed 9/11 and the terrorists. Obama has had to contend with the worst recession in nearly 80 years. Remember Hoovertowns? It’s fairly traditional in America to attribute to the president far more power over the economy than he actually wields.

The movement probably will fizzle out in 2012 or 2016, once Republicans regain a majority in Congress and regain the White House, and the economy improves. The Tea Party will have no Raison d'être . In the meantime, it seems that its main impact will be forcing Republican politicians to cater to a large group of extremists in their electorate. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that it will also lead to some rational discussion of economics, budget problems and the proper role of the state in modern life. But, on the other hand, I’d also like to believe that the Redskins will make it to the Super Bowl this year.

A Long-Expected Tea Party, etc

Part 4: Politics

“The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.” –Joseph Schumpeter

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any treatment of the Tea Party must include a discussion of their politics. Which are the great modern example of poorly-thought-through economic populism, combined with a bit of nativism and confused religious thinking. Many people at the rally sported ‘Faith Hope Charity’ T-shirts, since this was the official Rally Theme (is it just me, or did they borrow that middle one from some other recent political campaign?). However, there were a number of other shirts that were more overtly political, sporting messages such as ‘What part of illegal do you not understand?’, ‘SOS: Sick Of Spending’ and others claiming that they are the ‘Taxed Enough Already’ party. I was unable and unwilling to engage anyone at the rally directly in political debate, but I would like to comment briefly on each of these issues. Since there is no official Tea Party platform or spokesperson, it is hard to define a specific Tea Party platform on many issues, and the Tea Party is probably unfairly attacked many times whenever a commentator or politician attacks the views of a fringe member of the movement. Although, to be fair, the Tea Party has a lot of fringe members.

Firstly, the economic populism. The Tea Party’s views on economic issues are generally poorly informed, contradictory and self-serving. For instance, to take the budget deficit, they claim to be opposed to an $814 billion (ish) stimulus bill on the grounds that it will create a budget deficit that will be a burden to future generations, but they oppose letting the Bush tax cuts expire, despite the fact that this tax cut has taken $1.35 trillion out of public coffers. During the health care debate, they were strongly opposed to any sort of public option, yet clung obstinately to Medicare benefits, despite the fact that Medicare is going to be a much bigger drain on the budget than a public option could possibly be (and where were these folks when Bush signed a $550 billion Medicare extension bill?). There are two unfortunate economic truths that the Tea Party seems to be completely ignorant of. One, that taking into account the reduction in state and local government budgets, total government spending has roughly held steady during the recession, and the increase in the federal deficit is due almost completely to lower revenues caused by the recession. Two, that many economists believe that the federal budget deficit is going to destroy the nation within our lifetimes without significant policy changes, but that this is due to massive increases in spending for Social Security and Medicare, and other existing entitlement programs that are generally very popular with the public. Cutting these would do much to fix our fiscal problems, but would also be politically difficult. That, I would guess, is why the Tea Party chooses to focus its anti-tax rhetoric on frivolous issues.

As a Christian, it appalls me that the immigration debate often seems to assume that the only human beings that enter into our welfare formula are those who reside in and are citizens of the United States. The argument goes, immigrants come to our country illegally and take our jobs and benefit from (and pay into) our social system, and they must be stopped. The counter-argument is, more often than not, that we can’t stop them, so we might as well accept it. The idea that we might have some sort of a duty to help people in need, regardless of their nationality or skin color, does not seem to enter the debate. And none of these so-called libertarians seem to be bothered by the enormous restriction of individual freedom that tightly policed borders would bring about. That said, I have an enormous amount of sympathy for folks whose lives are disrupted and endangered by the immigrant and drug traffic that goes over the border and who are frustrated with the federal government’s inability to enforce its own laws. I can’t help but feel, though, that much of the Tea Party’s anti-immigration sentiment comes from a racist, nativist ideology, the unspoken idea that we have a right to be here and they don’t, which in fifty years will seem as prejudiced and delusional and anti-Irish sentiment during the middle of the nineteenth century seems to us now.

And then, there’s Beck’s Christian rhetoric. The irony in all this, to which he seems blissfully unaware, is that Beck’s ideal of an independent, self-confident, resourceful individual runs directly counter to the Christian ideal of a humble man dependent on God’s grace (and respectful of the civil magistrate, whom he believes was ultimately appointed by God). I also feel obliged to point out that his story about the Abraham and his wandering in the desert, which was brought to an end whenever he remembered that he was dependent upon God’s grace, is a tale which I am unable to locate in my Bible. Perhaps even more mystifying is Palin’s devotion to the Constitution. She claims that all of her politicking is done with the aim of protecting that sacred document, but she is ready enough to endorse repeal of the fourteenth amendment, and seems unwilling to engage in a discussion of the exact meaning of the phrase ‘well-regulated militia’ found in the second amendment. Obama used vague and confusing language during his campaign too, but when you came down to it, when he said people wanted Hope and Change, he meant that people wanted George Bush to not be president anymore, and he was right on that point. When Beck and Palin talk about God and the Bible and the Constitution, they seem to be, in effect, saying that they and their supporters like these things, and their opponents do not. One thing that I know for sure is that if a politician says that he is a believer and talks a lot about the role that his beliefs play or would play in public life, but does not mention that a fellow Christian might interpret things differently, that man is not to be trusted.

Beck does make a number of political points that I agree with. He is in favor of Hayekian legal theory, aka a simple and impartial law code. And he seems to be opposed to the collectivist ethic that says that moral issues move into the province of the state. It’s not our job to help the poor, the government will do it. But he’s such an melodramatic, attention-seeking sot that it’s nearly impossible for me to take any of more serious political arguments seriously.

A final point is that these protesters, like most protesters I have seen, seem to be completely delusional about the effect that their protest will have. I saw a group of people near the Lincoln Memorial holding signs denigrating Beck and his movement, who were shouting at tea partiers, and a number of tea partiers who were shouting back. So what happens here? What does this accomplish? Do they convince each other after a few hours, and switch signs and slogans? I didn’t grow up in the era of the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam protests, and I do not live in Iran, so maybe this colors my perception, but I can’t help but think that all this political protesting is a way to make yourself feel like you did a good deed, when in reality, you have not. The idea that protesters at this rally were ‘restoring honor to the republic’, which was the official title—and many other, more extravagant, self-congratulatory things were said to the crowd by various speakers—is just plain ludicrous. I can see literally no way that a normal human being who saw the things that I saw could get this impression. I think this attitude is in no way unique to this protest though: protesters generally have a bizarrely inflated view of the importance of their activites.

A short piece on spending growth

A piece on government debt

A serious piece on cutting entitlement spending

A Long-Expected Tea Party, Contd.

Part 3: Faith

“Two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?” -George Orwell

Beck was certainly tuned into his inner Jerry Falwell. We heard a lot about how faith in God’s grace would save us, as a nation. We heard that this was what the great men around us—he pointed to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the memorials for World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War had depended on, and what they had given their lives for. We heard how Beck himself was but a humble man, called on by God to take up his mantle. Surprisingly, there were absolutely no references, explicit or veiled, to the politicians of the Democratic Party whom Beck usually accredits with opposing all of these ideas. As I heard his speech, I was startled to notice how much the crowd loved it; people were cheering and applauding all through the speech. These were supposed to be the disillusioned third-partiers. Didn’t any of this seem phony to them? Didn’t it bother them that Beck was calling on the memory of Lincoln, who as president suspended habeas corpus, to support a platform of individual rights? What about the fact that he was invoking the memory of MLK, a black leader with communist sympathies, presumably to assist him in ousting another black leader whom Beck has accused of the same sympathies? And why, exactly, is a Mormon telling me about Jesus and Moses and acting like he and I have an identical theology?

It occurred to me as I reflected on these questions that conservatives and liberals often have profoundly different approaches to social problems. Liberals believe that our social ills are caused by problems in the structure of our society. Thus, climate change can be solved if we pass a few more laws, our financial system’s problems will be solved if we create an agency in charge of making sure they don’t happen and crime will go away if we put more money into the school system, pass stricter gun control laws and put some sort of welfare system into place. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that society’s problems are caused by people acting in immoral ways. They point out that, after all, we had agencies in charge of regulating the financial system; the problem is that they were downloading porn instead of doing their jobs. This attitude shows itself in a profound belief that conservatives have in the ability of individuals to bypass laws and regulations designed to curb their bad behavior, and their concern in making sure that society behaves morally, seen in issues such as prayer in schools, abortion and gay marriage. Obviously, this characterization is a simplification, but a useful one nonetheless.

Furthermore, there probably is a generation gap in terms of the connotation that terms like ‘the greatest generation’ conjure up. I was raised on Medal of Honor, Catch-22 and Letters from Iwo Jima, whereas some in the crowd had themselves fought in World War II, and I’m sure that many others, like my father, had relatives, who they are immensely proud of, who did fight against the Nazis. I grew up in the age of the invasion of Panama, the Kosovo conflict and the Iraq War, all conflicts that tend to promote the image of the military as merely a tool of American foreign policy, and one that is often poorly used, at that. Not to say that I have no respect for our nation’s servicemen and women and their courage and self-sacrifice, but I am skeptical of the claim that our soldiers are ‘protecting our freedom’ and I believe that the virtues of a civilian, or even a pacifist, may be equal or even superior to the virtues of a military man. Needless to say, many people at the rally have a more positive view of the military than I do, and much in Beck’s speech that seemed to me to be sentimental malarkey must have seemed to them to be an affirmation of their most deeply held values.

And what about the Mormon thing? Beck was certainly being dishonest, I think, by going so far out of his way to divert attention from his Mormon faith. Let me be clear—I do not believe that Mormons are Satanists, or that Mitt Romney should be excluded from the White House for his faith (he should be excluded because he is stunningly immoral and opportunistic, even for a Republican). However, I believe that the New Testament was the final revelation of God, and that the idea that Joseph Smith received further revelation from God is an onerous falsehood. And Beck’s willingness to distance himself from his faith to reach a larger audience does not speak well of his character. But, the willingness of the crowd to accept the religious pontifications of a Mormon does speak well of the commitment to acceptance and tolerance.

I think the rally and Beck’s speech makes sense when you compare it to an Obama rally from 2007. At both of them, a charismatic speaker uses a carefully honed collection of platitudes that speak to the most deeply held values of his listeners and promise them that the future will be better, and they can get to that future through hard work and the electoral process. In both cases, the crowd is disaffected. They believe that the politicians in Washington don’t represent their beliefs and values and that the president is making enormous mistakes that will permanently damage the country. That someone could really whole-heartedly buy into the promises that a demagogue in those circumstances makes is still a bit beyond my comprehension, however. My inner cynic reigns supreme.

A Long Expected Tea Party, Contd

Part 2: Race

The most damning thing said about the Tea Party by people who dislike it is that it is a racist organization. Given the racial makeup of this crowd, and the prevalence and persistence of the belief that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Antichrist, this is a claim that seems to be less than entirely baseless. However, the label ‘racist’ is one of the most dubious in the entire American political landscape, close behind ‘nazi’ and ‘socialist’. It is impossible to prove that you are not a racist—it requires a negative argument, so you would have to present careful documentation of your entire life to prove that you had never said or done anything racist—and individual charges are themselves hard to disprove. Groups like the Tea Party often do rather silly things to try to disprove the claim—for instance; I noticed at the rally that the Jumbo-Tron camera spent a disproportionate amount of time focusing in on a young African-American girl to create the false impression of diversity. All this does not mean that racism was not and is not an enormous problem in the United States, but it does mean that I am always suspicious whenever someone claims that someone else is a racist.
The only time anyone talked about racism that I saw was on the way in to the rally. A group of young, liberal-looking people were putting on a counter-protest, and one of them, a young black man, was shouting that the Tea Party excludes people, which is why the crowd was not multi-racial. I heard a woman walking next to me shout “No, it doesn’t!” quite loudly and angrily as she walked past, the only time at the rally where I saw someone appear genuinely upset. And, to be fair, no one likes to be called a racist, anymore than Bill Buckley liked being called a crypto-nazi.
As I gazed out over the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial a few minutes later, I had a minor epiphany. Myself, I could barely get over how freaking white the crowd was. But many of these folks had come out from places like rural northwestern or central Pennsylvania, rural Ohio or the rural South. I know myself, from my trips to visit relatives in these places, that they are overwhelmingly white. To the people who hail from these areas, nothing must have seemed unusual about the racial makeup of this crowd. It would be impossible for me to have done a meaningful survey of the crowd, so this statement is a bit of a generalization, but given its largely rural, Southern and Midwestern makeup, it seems quite likely that almost everyone there was from a middle or working class rural area that was predominantly white. To them, the charge that their movement must be racist because its rallies include few minorities must seem bizarre.
Especially because their leader, Mr. Beck, went out of his way to talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how inspired he was by him. The comparison was a bit odd, given that Beck is pro-military and MLK was a pacifist, and that Dr. King had communist sympathies, but it does say something about the movement’s underlying ideology. If the movement were genuinely, fundamentally racist, it seems logical that Beck’s speech would have included veiled references to it. True, he does claim to support ‘American, Christian values’, with the clear implication that the President does not, but most politicians—and all Republicans—do this. True, many in the African-American community were offended by Beck’s decision to have the rally on the anniversary of Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, but I honestly believe Beck when he says it was unintentional, and it was clear from the way the podium was set up that he is in no way trying to ape Dr. King. It was insensitive of him, and the lack of protest among members of the Tea Party themselves speaks to a certain level of unconcern with the needs and values of, say, the African-American population of DC. However, overall Beck’s attention to Dr. King indicates, I think, that he is trying to reach out to the black community and make the Tea Party movement more diverse and mainstream.
I am a white man. A remarkably white man, or so people tell me. Maybe, were I black, I would get a different feeling walking through that crowd. But what I did see when I looked around me was a group of people who wanted to effect political changes in the spheres that would affect them. They want lower taxes, less government regulation, less government interference in the economy and an assertive foreign policy. The narrowness of their worldview probably means that they do not particularly care, for instance, about urban poverty and the issues that surround it, unless it means higher taxes. But at the same time, Marion Barry and his constituents probably do not have particularly strong feelings about farm subsidies and agricultural programs unless they mean higher taxes. This speaks to a regionalization and narrowness in outlook on the part of our citizens, but the tea partiers by no means have a monopoly on these faults.

A Long-Expected Tea Party

Part 1: First Impressions

The first impression that I had of the tea partiers was of an overwhelming sea of whiteness. And middle-agedness. The Tea Party is the sexiest thing in politics in America at the moment, in the sense that anytime one of its members or leaders commit even minor acts, such as shopping at Whole Foods or expressing a view that some group or individual is racist, it is treated by the News Media as an Extremely Newsworthy Event, in a way that MY uninformed opinions rarely are. Not that I’m bitter. But despite its ‘sexiness’, the tea party itself looks like the extras from the Andy Griffith Show, if extras from the Andy Griffith Show wore matching American Flag shirts.

My previous experience with the Tea Party came mostly from T.V., and most of that came from short clips aired on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. Judging from these sources, tea partiers spend most of their time saying the n-word to black congresspersons, making badly misspelled signs, voting out moderate Republicans, and yelling at suspected Muslims in the vicinity of Ground Zero. On the other hand, I have heard polls suggesting that tea partiers are middle class, more wealthy and educated than the national average, and around 50% of them believe their tax levels to be fair. This lead me to believe that most of the attendees at these events are political voyeurs, much like myself, who are going to these events because they expect to find crazy people and be entertained.

So I was interested to see what I would find in the crowd today. One thing that instantly struck me is that the Tea Party is for real—it’s definitely not just 800 people and some dedicated Fox News coverage. The crowd was enormous. Beck said in his speech that there were 500,000 people in the crowd (okay, he said that he heard that there were 500,000 people there), and I think 200,000-300,000 is a good estimate. People came from all over. I talked to people from Texas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Utah, Oregon and Mississippi, and I’m sure just about every state had someone there. I’ve never seen such an awful line at the metro, and I was on the mall during the inauguration. One little girl in the crowd said as we got off the metro, “Mom, this line is even bigger than the line at Disney World!”. To which her mother replied “Yes, but this is for a good cause.” Elderly folks, young children, middle-aged couples, groups of four or five 60-ish women—any social unit that white people travel in was well-represented.

Which brings me back to the race thing. The Tea Party is, to me, a resident of Fairfax County (one of the most diverse places in America), staggeringly white. There were definitely a few persons of color in the crowd as well, but they were easily in the minority—as is a less-than-one-percent minority. There were a few African-Americans from Florida standing on the middle steps of the Lincoln Memorial, holding signs that read ‘Democrats Started the KKK’ and ‘Democrats Are the KKK’, but I’m not exactly sure where or if they fit into the Tea Party.

And then there’s the actual political rallying. The whole idea of a Tea Party rally is another thing that is a bit baffling to me. I have always assumed that protesting is something that college students do in order to get laid. Unless I misread their motives significantly, most of the attendees of Beck’s rally are past that stage in life. To be fair, they were also some of the most kind, friendly and cheerful ralliers I’ve ever met, although a few were vaguely suspicious of my Georgetown T-shirt. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, even the mothers with three or four kids who had to stand out in the sun for several hours, after a very uncomfortable metro ride. There was no sign of political radicalism, and the several black or Muslim people I noticed seemed to move through the crowd without attracting any more attention than anyone else did. There were a few signs I saw of Obama with a Hitler moustache, and one person handing out flyers had a sign denouncing him as a Socialist Racist Bigot, but other than that, no real political mudslinging. I found out afterwards that the organizers had asked folks not to bring signs, so perhaps without this edict, the skyline would have been festooned with ‘Keep Gummint out of my Medicaire’ banners, but somehow I find this hard to believe.

And then there was Beck’s speech. Which was the only speech I actually heard in full (the sound equipment setup was not perfect). I was expecting something much more political. He mostly talked about how much the laundry list of American Heroes inspires him and should inspire us and how we’ve always relied on God’s grace alone and the individual can accomplish anything, and more or less a bunch of other patriotic, conservative platitudes. Although, to his credit, he delivered them with force, timing and grace that I did not know he possessed. And the crowd loved it.

An Uninformed Christian Conservative Discusses Politics

After recently witnessing a rousing argument on the subject between two mildly intoxicated conservatives, I have decided to give my two cents on the quintessential piece of conservative dogma, “This nation was founded on Christian principles.”

Most people seem to believe that this statement is somewhat true, with qualifications, or quite false, with some exceptions. As usual, most people are dead wrong; the issue is quite black-and-white, although the answer depends completely on what you believe ‘Christian principles’ to be. If Christian principles means the principles of Western culture, to be distinguished from Buddhist principles, Hindu principles, animist principles, pagan principles etc., there can be no question that the United States of America stood, at its founding, at the apex of the Western political tradition, founded according to Christian principles, and certainly not, for instance, the principles of Scientology. If, however, by ‘Christian principles’ we mean ‘the principles of Christianity’, maintaining that this country was founded upon them is patently absurd. Though I have deep respect for the statesmen who shaped this nation in its infancy, I believe that it is patently obvious that they were far too realistic found a nation based on the principles of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control. At best, it can be said that this country was founded upon the principles of enlightened self-interest, and that the greatest concern of our founders was to prevent men from wreaking violence upon each other through the apparatus of a corrupt or tyrannical state. And although the United States is by no means remarkable among the nations of history for these traits, it is nevertheless true that much of our history has been marked by extremes of greed, violence, hypocrisy, racism, exploitation, materialism and self-indulgence.

So, the statement that this country was founded on Christian principles is either a bland truism, or else a bald-faced lie. But why are we even concerned about this in the first place? No one really seems to give a damn what sorts of principles other organizations, the Coca-cola institute, for example, were founded on. All too often, this statement seems to be an argument for a sort of automatic Christian primacy in our cultural and political life, made by the sorts of folks who want the Ten Commandments put in front of court houses and evolution out of our textbooks.
I believe that Christianity is the only real solution to the problems that confront us as a nation, as a society, as a global community, and as individuals. I believe that all that is best in modern conservatism and modern liberalism can be found in much greater abundance in Christianity. I believe that Christian principles such as humility, love, hope and faith through which a society, or an individual, can be transformed. But I do not believe that any nation has ever truly become more wealthy, more vibrant or more just by slavishly adhering to a romanticized myth of a national past, and I do not believe that an appeal to such a past on the part of conservative Christians is anything but intellectual laziness and hypocrisy.