Mar

15

Principle and Ideology

By Doctor Zero  Email To A Friend  Print This Article

The Tea Party has a lot of hard work ahead of it. Celebrating the early success of this remarkable movement should not distract us from the magnitude of the challenge we face. George W. Bush was nobody’s idea of a limited-government constitutional samurai, and his administration was several trillion dollars ago. Just getting back to where he left us would involve the largest reduction of government power and spending in our nation’s history… and it would be nowhere near good enough.

The early growth of the Tea Party has been fueled by the obvious menace of the government doubling in size, decades after it had already become insolvent. Its members seek a refuge of sanity from the madness of statists peeking over the latest thousand pages of new regulation, to happily announce a fresh hundred billion in deficit spending. People from many corners of society have tumbled into the Tea Party, because the lunatic Left pushed them.

There is a widespread reluctance to sacrifice the grassroots energy of the Tea Party, in exchange for central organization. The membership is understandably wary of being co-opted by opportunistic politicians, who would transform a powerful critique of the irresponsible super-State into a modest discount on the next hundred billion in deficit spending. The people who worked hard to launch local chapters of a spontaneous, organic movement are not eager to become regional managers of a Tea Party, Inc. franchise.

A certain degree of organization is essential to moving forward. A critique can be spontaneous and unfocused, but creating and supporting alternative policies will require unity. Already we’ve seen a few fringe characters associate themselves with the movement, and Harry Reid’s Democrats have tried downloading themselves into a Tea Party avatar to spoil the Nevada election for him.

Many of the people drawn into the Tea Party movement are uncomfortable with the deceptions and compromises of partisan politics. Compromising with our bloated and ravenous government means allowing it to grow a little, instead of a lot… and “little” means billions instead of trillions. The third-party temptation is a distraction, however, with an uncertain payoff years beyond the dead-end of systemic collapse. That means the Tea Party must use the Republican Party as the vehicle for transforming ideas into action.

You can see what I meant about having a lot of hard work ahead of us.

The United States has spent a hundred years trapped within a doomed model of the relationship between citizens and the State. Changing that model will be extremely difficult, because every one of its hideously overpriced, unsustainable components is protected by a dependent constituency, and the overall system is defended by a media dedicated to the belief Big Problems can only have Big Solutions implemented by Big Government.

Look at how Senator Jim Bunning was vilified for simply insisting Congress obey its own laws, and dip into a $500 billion slush fund, or make a few cuts elsewhere in a four trillion dollar budget, to pay for a $15 billion unemployment benefit extension. He wasn’t merely greeted with determined opposition. He was dismissed as insane, and his party did very little to support him. The champions of liberty and government restraint need a support system. They need the passion and clarity on display at those Tea Party rallies.

The election season of 2010 finds a large group of energized citizens who understandably dislike politics, confronted with the task of dismantling a system that has infused politics into virtually every aspect of American life. There is simply no apolitical way to interact with it… not any more. We can fortify ourselves against the messy business of partisan elections by remembering that our goal is to impose a set of principles upon the government, not an ideology. The Constitution was not meant as a tool to be adapted to various causes, or discarded when inconvenient. It was not presented to history as a set of suggestions for structuring the United States. Its genius lay in understanding that government must be required to observe its limits, always and everywhere, because allowing it to grow for “compassionate” reasons eventually produces a behemoth… with power based on the definition of compassion, not the consent of the governed. Government must be surrounded by walls of stone, because it has a way of leaking through chain-link fences.

Restoring constitutional restraint to government will be a massive undertaking, but it is not “radical.” It’s the most conservative project ever undertaken by the American electorate, for it seeks to conserve a birthright willed to us by quill pens scratching across parchment, centuries ago. There will be little else worth conserving if we fail to defend it. There won’t be much liberty for libertarians to discuss with the helpless, bitter supplicants of a government-run health care system. Moral enlightenment will not be found among the broken ruins of a bankrupt nation, after a mountain of unfunded liability comes crashing down.

I hope we can find a lasting unity in the power of limited-government principles that should never have been compromised. The time for listening to statists babble about compelling the obedience of Americans through massive, open-ended legislation is over. It’s time to talk about the obedience of the government to a single document it should never be allowed to ignore, written in a spirit that Americans should never allow themselves to forget.

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