So I am in a bit of a funk.
I have been sick for the last few days. Well, I have actually been sick for about 2 weeks; getting mildly sick, nurturing the illness through continued healthy-like-behavior, then getting absolutely debilitated for a few days. So for the last 3 days or so, I have been pretty much worthless to the world with constant coughing, little capability to speak eloquently, and very little motivation to do much of anything.
I am on a weird schedule at school and so I only have a single class that meets twice a week. So I barely even get the privilege of speaking to human beings other than my wife.
So how do I pass the time? Well generally I sit on the couch in the same place I always do. I stare at Facebook and the other sites I read daily (or constantly would be more appropriate) waiting for something to happen. And I watch the news.
Nothing is more depressing that sitting at home watching the news.
As best as I can tell, the Tea Party is made up predominantly of young people that are out of work, and retired seniors. (Or at least the non-corporate sponsored members.) Both of these groups spend a lot of their day as I have been spending mine. Sitting at home and watching the news. And as I am discovering, there are few better ways than this very activity to make you hate everyone in government, and to feel depressed and helpless as to affecting the system. So I can see why they go out, put on their silly hats, hold up their misspelled signs, and yell at things they don't understand. If this was my life for an extended period of time, I could see myself descending down that road. Maybe with different things to yell at, since my core beliefs are about as far from Libertarianism as they could get, but I would certainly find a way to get out of the house and let out some of my impotent rage (as the wise Jon Stewart calls it).
So how would we combat this? I don't pretend to be an expert, or even really knowledgeable on the subject of social psychology, but I think there are some things that may cause the movement to collapse. The worst possible way for it would be to actually let them get their way. This is a phenomenally bad idea, as their policies are as unsustainable in the modern world as Communism is ever, and way more fraught with peril for the position of the US in the international community. There needs to not just be a strong central government that has the capability of controlling the country within its borders, but a unified one that can operate as the sole representative of everyone in the country. This is why the Articles of Confederation failed, and why it wasn't until the consolidation of power following the Civil War that the US wasn't just an also-ran in world politics. The Libertarian world view is hard to describe as a world view; it is merely a castration of central power, and empowerment of the individual states. This would disadvantage the US economically; it would provide a much greater hurdle to sustaining a modern and superior military, and make international relations much more difficult to engage in.
There is also the option of merely electing one or more (but certainly not a plurality) of their candidates to a high office, such as the Senate. This is certainly reasonable, especially given the popularity of candidates such as Ron and Rand Paul. The reason I accept this as a potential positive is twofold: one, it takes away from the republican voting bloc since a Libertarian/Tea Party office holder would ostensibly vote to the contrary of a lot of mainstream Conservative ideals (large military, pro war, etc); two, it will show the innate flaws of electing hard line political idealists. It is neither beneficial to the country nor your constituents to be unwilling to compromise. The idea of meeting in the middle to find a better way forward has long been the guiding principle of representative governments such as our own. By voting against any legislation that empowers the federal government, that representative will probably vote in favor of very little legislation. But the eventuality that these candidates will need to reach is the necessity of compromise. Sometimes to get something that is in line with your ideology, you have to give up a little, make some concessions that maybe don’t quite reach that ideal. In order to get health insurance reform passed, universal coverage was given up in order to garner the votes necessary for passage. What the budding Tea Party has shown in their year or two of existence is a complete opposition to compromise. It is what has gotten several dyed in the wool Republicans removed from office (and even on the left there has been increasing resistance to compromise, but it there is still the overt desire for bipartisanship). Once their candidates have proven that they are not opposed to the federal government, but in fact they are politicians, they will lose their credibility with their electorate, and there will be a quickly revolving door of disappointment leading to the further marginalization of the movement. I am not sure this would kill the large scale aspirations of the party, but it would prevent expansion past the replacement of candidates already in place.
The best way I can picture of minimizing the typical types of protesters is to actually enact all of the social programs they are speaking out so vehemently against. I realize that there are a good number of actual Libertarians that have rightly dissociated themselves from the Tea Party because of their innate insanity and their poor understanding of what they are actually protesting, so I exclude them from this portion because they will still oppose these things, and likely not even partake in them. The groups mentioned above that are the principal make up of the Tea Party stand to benefit the most from expansive social programs. Many of these people in fact already owe a lot to the 'socialist' programs like Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and food stamps. Because of the financial disaster helped in part by the laissez faire economics they promote, the recently unemployed in the group go often for several months with no health insurance coverage, or enroll in Medicaid. They subsist off of unemployment, food stamps, and probably blamed the government for not assisting them when their houses were foreclosed upon. If there were further programs put in place to help them, it is possible they could turn around and come to like the idea of a government 'for the people' . . . who am I kidding, they will always complain about it.
What I have learned through the last few years is that people will believe what they want to believe. Believing that the programs the current administration is trying to implement equates to socialism isn’t actually very fair to socialism. And it shows a complete misunderstanding of what socialism actually is. Believing that the President wants to destroy the country is just appalling. The misinformation labeled as fact on ‘news’ channels is disheartening, and sadly we are a nation full of people that don’t research the things we hear.
So this trend is not going to go away, especially as long as people self-censor the sources of their news intake. I try and read and watch news from all sides, and I think everyone else should as well. But again, who am I kidding? MSNBC is full of communists (or Nazis if you believe certain Fox News commentators), CNN is the Communist News Network, the New York Times is full of Democratic Party hacks, etc. Of course Fox News is just a wing of the Republican Party, as is the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. All of these are true, and false. There is wheat, and there is chaff. In the case of some of these there is a lot more chaff. But my diatribe on media is for another day.
Well, it is time for me to get some work done. This is a rant that I have had in my head for a long time, and will continue to evolve. Comment below if you like. Otherwise, do some research and see how off base I am, or if I am right. Either way, learning is the most important part.
