I haven’t given up on tea parties." - Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) to the National Press Club, July 9, 2009
I became intrigued with the mindset of Senator Jim DeMint after he made the incredibly ignorant statement that the US today is "about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy." So I decided to look into his "manifesto": Saving Freedom: We can stop America's slide into Socialism. I was not disappointed: the book is replete with appalling distortions and outright falsehoods.
I personally admire and respect George and Laura Bush and greatly appreciate their service to our nation. They restored moral dignity and honor to the White House. - Senator Jim DeMint, Saving Freedom
Saving Freedom is the story of a God-fearing businessman who selflessly goes to Washington to fight the good fight of stopping creeping "socialism". "Socialism" in DeMint's limited vocabulary, means any government program except the military. Social Security, Medicare, Public Education - you name it - these programs create a dependency on government that DeMint equates with socialism. They must be stopped. But, other than a few brave souls such as Dick Army ("a brilliant leader"), DeMint has had difficulty finding like-minded freedom fighters in Congress. So the purpose of Saving Freedom is to appeal directly to the American people to rise up and protect "Freedom".
In Saving Freedom, DeMint bases his philosophy of freedom on two heavyweights: F.A Hayek (falsely identified as a "German philosopher") and Jesus. Unfortunately, DeMint appears to to have read neither. His commentary on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is based solely on Milton Friedman's introduction to the book, but not on Hayek's writings. DeMint celebrates unregulated capitalism, but Hayek actually criticized the notion of a pure laissez-faire economy in his book. Likewise, DeMint's image of Jesus as a tax-cutting free-market capitalist is at odds with the Jesus of the New Testament. And is DeMint aware that his hero Hayek was, at best, indifferent to religion? But no matter, DeMint is only interested in the title of Hayek's book - The Road to Serfdom - rather than in Hayek's writings, which would require reading and understanding some complex ideas.
Actually, it is rather amusing that DeMint and other American conservatives cite Hayek as their hero. In 1960, Hayek wrote an interesting essay, Why I am Not a Conservative, which was highly critical of the American conservative movement. Then, as now, American conservatives were hostile to science, and Hayek took them to task:
Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it - or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. [...]I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.
Such nuance exhibited by Hayek here is way beyond the grasp of Jim DeMint, for whom Hayek is merely an intellectual version of Ronald Reagan.
One thing struck me about DeMint's book is the sense that this man has most likely rarely been outside the US. Europe, his view, is already lost to "socialism" and therefore has fallen to tyranny. This view that Europeans live in some sort of Orwellian totalitarianism animates his hostility to health care reform.
If we do this (stop health care reform) we will have struck a blow for freedom by stopping our freefall towards European socialism – the sort of system proposed in the early nineties by a recent First Lady.
In Saving Freedom DeMint envisions a Jesus-driven, low-tax world, where business is free of regulation and individuals are free of the "tyranny" of government sponsored welfare (Social Security), health care (Medicare) and public education. Ironically, this pretty much describes his home state of South Carolina, which has some of the lowest taxes in the US, and ranks at the bottom in terms of education, health care. At the same time, this low-tax state has about the highest levels of unemployment and poverty. Who will "save" South Carolina from Senator Jim DeMint and his know-nothing worldview?