It started with a summer health care town hall meeting when a senior citizen angrily stood up and shouted, "keep your government hands off my Medicare," not appreciating the irony that Medicare is run lock, stock, and barrel by the government. Now, factless ranting has morphed into a full blown movement.
Members can be seen raving that President Obama is both a Socialist and a fascist, not knowing that the two are opposing ideologies. (more below)
I’m sure none of the Tea Partiers heard of, let alone read, Keynes’ "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money." Blissfully ignorant of established economics, they call for repeating the policies of Hoover’s Depression enabling Administration – namely, balancing the budget during a deep recession. While running big deficits in the face of the worst economic dive in 80 years is actually the only way to steady the economy, don’t tell them that, they don’t want to know. They’ll tell you everything would have worked out just fine if we’d simply let the entire economy collapse a year ago.
The Tea Partiers call themselves populists but gravitate to the right-wing who, given the chance, would privatize their Social Security, eliminate their Medicare, eviscerate social programs that benefit them, eliminate bank regulation that protect their savings, and export their jobs to foreign countries.
The movement’s discourse is appealing rhetoric delivered by demagogues. Steven Millroy, who runs JunkScience.com, said at the Tea Party convention, "President Obama is not a U.S. socialist. He's an international socialist. He envisions one world government. That's what his whole plan is." We can only guess that Millroy must have arrived at that conclusion because Obama likes Star Trek.
Former Republican Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo suggests that the country would be better off if we required "civics literacy tests" before people can vote. I wonder how that would have sat with Tancredo’s Italian-immigrant grandparents? As a boy, I lived in a mixed neighborhood inhabited by many Italian immigrant citizens who could barely speak English. My grandmother’s native language was Yiddish and could not read English. Yet, nobody thought they weren’t good enough to let vote -- except the know-nothing nativists who would have kept most of our ancestors out of this country; who claimed they would ruin the "stock;" that they would never be smart enough, they would never learn English, they could never be "assimilated."
The support columns of the Tea Party movement are unfocused anger. They’re angry that bankers got a better deal than they did (me too); they’re angry that there is high unemployment; they’re angry that the government spends a lot of money; and, their especially furious that Obama wants to tackle the health care costs that are bankrupting the nation – and is doing so with a plan that roughly resembles Republican Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, and even the plan that some Republicans suggested in the 1990s as an alternative to Clinton’s. It’s hilarious to call that socialism. But then, that’s exactly what Ronald Reagan called Medicare in the 1960s, isn’t it? You might think they’d learn something from that. Not a chance.
But then, you wouldn’t expect today’s Know Nothings to actually know any American history. Because, if they did, they would also know that America at its most successful has required both an active government and a thriving private sector.
It was an active government that built public land-grant colleges in the 1800s to help farmers learn, thrive, and feed a growing nation. It was an active government that established rules of the road for safe food in the 1910s and 1920s, and a safe stock market and banking system in the 1930s (until conservatives of both parties chose to unleash the unfettered forces of greed in the 1990s and 2000s, with horrifying results). It was an active government that built the interstate road system and provided the Federal Housing Authority loans after World War II that made the American suburbs possible; that provided GI Bill funded college educations to soldiers who went on to lead most of America’s great companies; that funded the "blue-sky" research which led to the Internet that hosts their rants today. These things were done by representative American governments doing things that private individuals simply could not do for themselves, as individuals: visionary, crucial things that made it possible for us to live as we do, and would never have happened otherwise.
Every step of the way, conservatives stood in the way. During the 1930s, many on the right denounced Franklin Roosevelt as a "Socialist" even though his family was wealthy blue-bloods. The same right-wing argued that America should not aid the British as they combated Nazi Germany. The right-wing was on there wrong side of history then, as it is now. Could we imagine for a second what the world would be like today if FDR had bent to his right-wing critics and cancelled Lend-Lease and America let Britain fall to the Nazis, or allowed the Great Depression to continue unrestrained by the New Deal?
Revisionists claim that the New Deal didn’t work but that’s why they’re revisionists. The fact is that from 1929 to 1933, when Roosevelt took office, GDP had halved and private unemployment soared to 25%. Upon enacting the New Deal, unemployment dropped officially by half. It unofficially dropped more but workers employed by the WPA, CCC and other government programs were not considered employed, by 1930s measures. Conservatives contend that World War II ended the Depression but by arguing so, are unwittingly accepting the premise that huge amounts of government spending (e.g. stimulus) is what broke the depression.
FDR recognized that there would always be 20-25% of the people who would never stop criticizing him. He dealt with them by ignoring and ridiculing their views, not allowing their viral views to infect his policies. In 1937, FDR did heed to critics and cut back the New Deal stimulus, and it drove the country straight back into deep recession.
President Obama is attacked by Republicans for everything, from hiring "czars" and trying terrorists in civilian courts, just as the previous president did. His wife is also attacked. There’s nothing new there. Roosevelt and his family also were the brunt of relentless and continuous attacks by Republican leaders and their puppets in the media, who were just as much the soulless pricks as they are today.
A vicious attack claimed that Roosevelt ordered a Navy destroyer to transport his dog, Fala. Roosevelt counterattacked with biting humor:
"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself--such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."--Sept. 23, 1944
My advice to clear-headed policymakers: Be like Roosevelt; ignore and ridicule the Tea Party crowd. You can’t argue with the irrational or the uninformed. You can’t reason with people who seriously think that the President of the United States wants to destroy America. Just because they are serious doesn’t mean they deserve to be taken seriously. Their views should be mocked so that everyone can witness the contrast between hysteria and rationality.
Likewise, you can’t negotiate with a political party that wants you to accomplish nothing. Any concession will be greedily taken without reciprocation on their part. The only way to deal with that crowd is the steamroller approach.
-Joel Peskoff