William Galston has some facts.
Many frustrated liberals, and not a few pundits, think that people who share these beliefs must be downscale and poorly educated. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.
Although some tea-party supporters are libertarian, most are not. The Public Religion Research Institute found that fully 47% regard themselves as members of the Christian right, and 55% believe that America is a Christian nation today—not just in the past. On hot-button social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, tea partiers are aligned with social conservatives. Seventy-one percent of tea-party supporters regard themselves as conservatives.
Galston also has delivers some insinuations and assumptions. In particular, he assumes that the the Tea Party movement is some sort of dysfunctional emotional reaction and that the establishment is correct on the fundamental policy issues.
It is possible that this view is correct. However, the probability is not zero that the establishment view on the budget (spend more now; the future will take care of itself, or brilliant health care technocrats will take care of it, or something) is more dangerous than the view of the Tea Party. In fact, the establishment strikes me as suffering from a dysfunctional emotional reaction every time the topic of future budget commitments is brought up.
The establishment has stabilized the short term debt to GDP ratio after a series of budget cuts. So I would characterize the debate as “take care of the present and the future can take care of itself” vs “no, take care of the present and the future right now.” It’s a question of “should we aim to put our fiscal house in order over the next 10 or the next 70 years?” It strikes me a weird that the same person who would ridicule the government’s ability to plan and control the healthcare sector would, in the context of spending levels, credit them with the ability to plan what the US economy will look like in 70 years and the ability to control all future governments who might want to spend more or less.
Now to the extent mainstream opinion sometimes lapses into not worrying about the defecit over any time frame, I’m right there with you. In 2009 this post would have been a good critique.
“the probability is not zero that the establishment […] is more dangerous than the view of the Tea Party.”
Adults are generally more dangerous than children.
Politics is about expending political capital to make policy changes. Whereas the tea party doesn’t expend capital. They are most likely to vote yes when their vote will have no consequence. They’re happy to take credit for the budget control act, but most tea partiers didn’t even vote for it. How many opportunities for “going big” on debt and deficits have already been lost because they can’t be depended on to vote yes? I count at least 2.
At some point the tea party will need to graduate math class, start using some bayesian thinking to vote yes. Otherwise they’ll be PINOs. Given everything that happened in the last 12 months and what is known the republican party needs to do to win actual elections, and what the tea party chose instead to do here…. you have to wonder whether those guys are really just PINOs.
I think the “downscale and poorly educated” thing is attacking a bit of a straw man. While the Tea Party can be pretty hard to define, my simplified view is that it’s populism directed sideways and downward, egged on by the super-rich (Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, the Kochs, etc.) The key quote in Santelli’s founding rant was “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” It was about fueling resentment toward your “loser” neighbors.
Hmmm. I took Santelli’s quote not as imputing a moral value of “loser” to one’s “neighbors,” but rather as rhetorically asking how many financially prudent people would want to have money taken from them by the force of government to bail out those who had not been prudent in their housing purchases and financings.
I do not judge how you spend your money; in turn, you should not look to me to fill your wallet when you run short.
The Tea Party is not at all hard to define. All of the separate tea party groups’ representatives repeat & explain their shared principles over and over and over again: to seek fiscal responsibility, free markets, smaller government. If one were paying the least attention, it would be hard to miss.
The Tea Party is to Conservatism what Environmentalism is to Progressivism. The Tea Party was founded because it saw the ever rising national debt as a threat to the American way of life now and in the future. Tea Partiers talk about the entitlement/welfare state as unsustainable given our demographics and rose up when they saw that Washington politicians doing nothing but kicking the can down the road. Therefore, if their positions seem extreme it is because they think the public is short-sighted and reforms need to happen now, even if they are painful, to stave off a worse future. Environmentalists talk about the same scenario, but it is about the threat of global warming instead of debt and entitlements.
Great analogy!
I’ve been known to tell Progressives that they are “economics deniers”, “economic creationists” (don’t believe in emergent systems, believe a well-functioning system must be the product of intelligent design, ignore tons of data that says markets – while imperfect – outperform central planning), and “ignoring settled science in economics”.
I like the “global warming” angle.
the tea party isn’t about reducing the debt it’s about reducing taxes (Taxed Enough Already). this is why they rejected both ~4trillion grand bargains that obama and boehner put together, because taxes were involved. or getting repub debate candidates to not accept 1 dollar of tax increases for 10 dollars of cuts… that’s TEA drinking at work.
It’s complete stupidity though…. tea party doesn’t have a balanced budget proposal, their budgets require deficits until 2040. Yet they’re against raising the debt ceiling. How to reconcile these positions?? Don’t worry about that, lets just have some tea and rail at anything named obama.
To somebody who generally prefers conservatives, the tea party has made voting republican an embarrassment. Their ideas are all anger-based and not thought through, aka impossible to sell to anybody who doesn’t already agree.
If proposed spending cuts do not include addressing the major problems with the big three entitlements, then no “grand bargain” is worth the time of discussion.
If proposed spending cuts are revealed to merely be minor reductions in the rate of spending increases, then they count less than advertised, and are virtually worthless as a tradeoff.
If the Republicans agree to an increase in taxes that takes effect immediately (if not retroactively), in return for promises to cut spending some time in the future, which historically has been a promise not met, then that is not something that meets the tea party movement’s definition of “cutting spending.”
“tea party doesn’t have a balanced budget proposal, their budgets require deficits until 2040” — that is better than having NO budget at all and continuing to run up ~$1T annual deficits until the sun burns out. The Obama & Democratic spending programs parse out at cumulative debt that is unprecedented by a huge margin. I’ll take 2040 over infinity.
Politically active generally implies higher education and wealth. The difference is they try to appeal to the less educated and poorer with a lot of nonsense and cheap polemics and you would have to be less educated and poorer to fall for their arguments or be more educated and wealthier and know they are really are for keeping your taxes low and deficits high. “Keep your government hands off my Social Security” hardly sounds like anyone seeking entitlement reform. The same with spending cuts that have to be balanced with tax cuts. The same with trying to dictate what some distant congress must do on the budget while avoiding cuts to their entitlements. They possessed the greatest entitlement of all, that of rule and are not at all happy with losing it and that is the most important thing to know about them.
It’s actually simpler than that, and completely data-free.
Progressives believe that formal education is indicative of virtue, thus they slam their opponents as uneducated.
Libertarians believe that work is indicative of virtue, thus they slam their opponents as lazy.
Conservatives believe that faith is indicative of virtue, thus they slam their opponents as faithless.