Tea Party Movement

Jennifer Rubin of Commentary blogs about David Brooks's New York Times article. Even a Times Democrat like Brookes admits:

"the new administration has not galvanized a popular majority. In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13."

Rubin makes several good points in response:

”The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems.” Actually, I think it’s fair to say (in fact Brooks has been candid enough to say it on occasion) that the Obama team has become infatuated with a certain type of problem-solving — centralized, blind to unintended consequences, arrogant in the assumption of expertise, and lacking humility about government bureaucrats’ ability to micromanage the lives of hundreds of millions of us."

Like most of the Times's writers, the author has insufficient knowledge of American history or the philosophy underlying the nation's founding to understand the Lockean motivation behind the Tea Parties' outrage. The Times, like America's ill-educated "elite" in general, lacks the intellectual foundation to grasp why their ideas repeatedly fail; why many find them administration distasteful; and why better-educated tea party enthusiasts aim to throw the New York Times-supported bums out the door.