Amerika

The Tea Party isn’t a crusade for small government. It’s a clash of personal values systems and the types of civilization they suggest. Whatever the future of the Tea Parties, the fundamental split in Western politics will remain until solved.

The Tea Parties in the USA, Europe and now Canada have really captured my imagination. It’s rare to see such a populist upswell in one’s own lifetime.

What I’d like to do here is give quick summaries on Tea Party-related ideas:

• The Tea Party isn’t about small government. It’s about a clash of personal values systems, each of which implies its own kind of government. Conservatives like competition and hard moral values; liberals like inclusiveness and subsidies. “Small government” is a means to an end; the means is the destruction of moral government, and the end is termination of subsidies to those who don’t play by middle class value systems. It’s Soft Darwinism versus Soft Totalitarianism.



• From that, we can see that the Tea Party is not a hybrid, but a purely conservative movement that is opposing a conservative political establishment that has for too long played along with the liberal agenda. Personal values systems that are lower-case “c” conservative translate into government that is Conservative, but not necessarily neoconservative/neoliberal. Values systems that are liberalized inevitably degenerate to a paternalistic state that subsidizes us all equally in exchange for absolute obedience to dogma.
• The mainstream parties don’t get it. The Democrats, who are expecting easy pickings, are making themselves the party of misfits, the lower classes, and imported voters. They’re forgetting that middle class small business and leadership is what makes this country prosperous. If they enact their policy changes, they’ll slaughter the source of wealth. On the other hand, the Republicans still can’t run a campaign. They’re not adopting Tea Party ideals for fear of being called “racist”,”classist”, and probably homophobe and sexist, too. The problem is that Republicans have drifted too far from conservative values, and too cozily into the political machine.
• This is a sea change worldwide. After WWII, we thought the enemy was nationalism and authoritarianism. Now we’re seeing that liberal democracy reaches soft totalitarian status by being “nice” and becoming a Nanny State, and that anti-nationalism creates an angry gray race who because they have no culture or heritage in common, depend on the creation of soft totalitarian states. As a result, people are starting to see WWII as a superpower race, not a conflict between good/evil egalitarian/racist authoritarian/”free.” That’s a nice wakeup call.
• In Europe and the USA, we’re seeing two sacred cows die. First is that the way out of class warfare is to make nice to the lower classes; class warfare continues to be a problem on both continents, and has exploded in Greece, where the dependent welfare state has created people who won’t cut their own benefits even if it bankrupts the nation. Second is the illusion that multiculturalism is a workable phenomenon. We are seeing how the healthiest societies are those like Finland, where they both are ethnically homogenous and didn’t get defeated or nuked in a war.
• The Tea Party would do best to become a “Green Tea” Tea Party, in that its basic aim is preservationism. To the American middle classes, there’s nothing wrong with nature and natural selection. The best rise, the weakest die by their own incompetence, and everyone else benefits from the added wisdom, intelligence and aggressive problem-solving of the best. They are not on a jihad like their opposition, the Progressive-Socialist-Communist spectrum, to re-make nature so that we’re all equal. The natural counterpart to this vision is natural preservationism as well. We don’t need Greenism or environmental laws, but we need to leave more land there for nature — conservationism. Tea Parties should and will endorse this because it is symbolic of and complementary to their agenda.
• Israel needs a Tea Party. As in most civilizations, there’s a constant threat that the majority group gets undermined by its workers. For good or ill, the Jewish people reclaimed their historical state — the land to which they are indigenous despite some European mixture — and built a modern nation on the ruins of former Roman colony Palestine. Now there remains a large Arab population that does much of their day labor, like Mexicans in the Southern US. Israel is being forced to decide whether it’s a Jewish state, or a Middle Eastern nation-state where anyone can show up. If you want to preserve the Jewish people, Jewish culture, and Jewish religion, you’re going to have to become a Jewish state and not a USA-on-Jerusalem.
• The left is demonstrating its absolute inability to see beyond its own perspective. These are the people of black and white because they have never accepted that life is a space in which we make things, not a paternalistic sky-god that hands us free things and doles out fairness. Life is not fair. It is better than fair; it’s a facilitator for our dreams. But industrial society has produced a vast underclass and dropout class that basically hates life and wants “fairness” as revenge. They’re not going to ever admit the American and European middle classes have a right to exist. In fact, they want to destroy them, and destroy not only culture, but heritage and any values systems; this way, whatever their dysfunction, this Crowd will be deemed morally acceptable.

As pointed out in a recent column, the post-WWII culture wars are coming to a head and it’s looking a lot like Civil War 2.0. These are exciting times, my peeps, and how we handle them determines our future. If we apply a band-aid, the problems will persist for another dozen generations or longer. If we opt for inflexibility, we risk war but could separate the middle class, Christian-ish, lower-case “c” conservative group from the alienated dropouts. If we try to make these two incompatible groups co-exist, we pass on war for now but force one to dominate the other in the future, which will continue crippling political discourse and lead to an eventual greater war.

“May you live in interesting times,” indeed!