Why the Tea Party Doth Protest Enough

The above graph shows the growth in total government spending, including state, local and federal, divided by gross domestic product, since 1948.  Notice the asterik at the far right that jumps up above the rest of the pack.  The outlier reflects President Obama's and the Democratic Party's outlays last year.  This was the most radical movement in spending in the past 62 years.  A similarly radical increase will occur in 2010.

Notice that one can draw an arc from 1948, when Harry Truman was president, to 2010.  The arc over-arches a V shaped pattern that began in the early 1990s and ended in 2009.  The Bush administration and Republican Congress of the mid '00s began the upwarded-moving right-hand leg of the V shape pattern after 2000  by gradually reversing the spending cuts of the Republican Congress during the Clinton years.  In other words, the federal government's best performance from the standpoint of an advocate of small government was during a Republican legislature and Democratic presidency. 

The Obama administration and Democratic Congress have effected  a radical shift from fiscal conservatism and the conservative consensus of the past 30 years.  The Democrats' radical shift amounts to a return to the social democratic arc (in the above graph) of the mid twentieth century.  In other words, the election of President Obama represents a return to the ideas of social democracy that were prevalent before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

 
The next graph above shows the growth of non-defense government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product since 1948.  There were high post-World War II expenditures that were reduced during the Truman years.  From the early 1950s, the Eisenhower years, through 1980 there was a rapid increase in non-defense federal spending.  The election of Ronald Reagan changed the trend, but only moderately.  Between 1980 and 2010, three decades during which small government conservatives had a voice in government, spending fluctuated but remained roughly constant.

President Obama's spending levels represent a radical break back to the pattern of  the social democratic years of the early 1950s. Notice that the small government movement that President Reagan started did not reduce non-defense government spending.  A Republican Congress impeached Bill Clinton and proposed cuts in the Contract with America, but was unable or unwilling to execute sharp reductions in government spending.  The late twentieth century Republicans were moderate.  For many in the small government movement they were too moderate.  The Tea Party is on the avant garde of change on behalf of small government.

President Obama and congressional Democrats washed away three decades of moderation in a single, radical swipe.  We of the Tea Party anticipate further radicalism from the Democrats.  The Tea Party is insisting that the Republicans develop a taste for realistic change.

When defense spending is included in the ratio of federal government spending to gross domestic product in the above chart, several shifts become evident.  Until the late 1980s, including the Reagan administration, spending increased.  The difference between President Reagan and his predecessors was that he focused on defense spending and downloaded spending to the states via his new federalism.  The military spending paved the way for the peace dividend of the early 1990s.  As well,  the Republican Congress  gradually limited non-defense federal spending.

President Bush increased spending, partially for military reasons associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The shift was not nearly so pronounced as it was in the first year of the Obama administration with its stimulus package.  It is true that Bush reversed much of the progress that the Republicans made from the early 1980s until 2000.  However, Bush's spending increases were not so radical as Obama's.    

The final graph is of state spending divided by Gross Domestic Product since 1948.  There was a significant dip in state spending during the 1970s during President Nixon's new federalism and then a significant increase during President Reagan's new federalism.

During the Bush years state spending advanced once again.  Currently, state and local spending divided by gross domestic product is at the highest level in history, and federal government spending divided by gross national product also is at the highest level in history.  With the stimulus and health care law, the Obama administration has altered federal spending to fit the mid twentieth century pattern that had ended in 1980 (as represented by a line that can be drawn from early 1950s non-defense federal spending levels to the Democratic Party's spending level in 2009 or as an arc with respect to total government spending).

Advocates of small government may rightly conclude that the Republicans' chief error during the past 30 years was  moderation.  The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are interested not in consensus but in a radically reactionary return to the social democracy of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon era.  The public rejected that consensus in 1980 and non-defense spending was kept roughly constant.  This is consistent with a moderate perspective whereby the Republicans recognized the interests of a large segment of the population that still believes in the social democratic programs of the 1930s to 1970s. Many in the small government movement would like to see those programs wound down.  However, the Democrats do not respect those who believe in small government in any way that parallels the respect that Republicans showed to Democrats.  This needs to change if the Republicans hope to regain office.

Small government advocates do not believe that government solves problems; that the Obama health reform law will save lives; or that current government programs such as the department of education or the department of energy have succeeded.  In future, given the radicalism that Democrats have shown, those who believe in small government have no ground to exercise moderation. The only explanation for doing so will be incompetence.   Were the Democrats, like George W. Bush, moderate in their big government stance, moderation among small government advocates might be a realistic strategy.  But to maintain a moderate bargaining position in the face of President Obama's radicalism would be absurd.

Hence the Tea Party.  The mass media has been unwilling to comprehend the Tea Party's nature.  When I Google the words "tea party racist" I obtain more than 2.1 million hits. But the Tea Party meetings I have attended have contained less racism than the average university faculty meeting. The Tea Party movement is not racist and it is non-violent. It is composed of people who were willing to accept the disappointing, moderate consensus of the Reagan and Clinton years, but whose moderation has been betrayed.

Aristotle: Federal Government Not A State

In Politics (1279-81) Aristotle argues that states exist for the sake of a good life. The Declaration of Independence restates this when Jefferson writes that rights include "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", an Aristotelian as well as a Lockean formula. In fact, Jefferson had been trained in Greek and Latin, as were the majority of the Founders. Positing the pursuit of happiness as the chief constitutional goal was taken from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, in which Aristotle posits "eudaimonia", normally translated as "happiness", as the chief object of human existence. As Jefferson and the Founders well knew, happiness was the product of a virtuous life. In Aristotle's view, the existence of virtue suggested the existence of God.

Aristotle insists that states do not exist for alliances or security from crime, or for economic exchange and commerce. Rather, "virtue must be the care of a state which is truly so called...for without this end the community becomes a mere alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart; and law is only a convention, 'a surety to one another of justice,' as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real power to make the citizens' good and just.

"This is obvious; for suppose distinct places such as Corinth and Megara, to be brought together so that their walls touched, still they would not be one city, not even if the citizens had the right to intermarry, which is one of the rights peculiarly characteristic of states. Again, if men dwelt at a distance from one another but not so far off as to have no intercourse, and there were laws among them that they should not wrong each other in their exchanges, neither would this be a state. Let us suppose that one man is a carpenter, another a husbandman, another a shoemaker and so on and that their number is ten thousand: nevertheless, if they have nothing in common but exchange, alliance and the like, that would not constitute a state...It is clear then that a state is not merely a society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence arise in cities family connexions, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for the will to live together is friendship. The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sacrificing life, by which we mean a happy and honourable life.

"Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship. Hence they who contribute most to such a society have a greater share in it than those who have the same or a greater freedom or nobility of birth but are inferior to them in political virtue; or than those who exceed them in wealth but are surpassed by them in virtue."

But is the United States a nation that encourages virtue? The United States has increasingly disowned the Christian religion, which for many, likely a majority, is the foundation of virtue. The United States does not offer in the place of Christianity a coherent definition of virtue. Many argue for secular humanism, an inarticulate, disjoint set of claims that devolves into special interest brokerage, the commercial contracting which Aristotle argues cannot be the foundation of a living state.

The recent bailout rejects virtue in the interest of opportunism. Forgetting the claim (which I say elsewhere is nonsensical) that the bailout was necessary to prevent a "depression", to what degree is a nation that rewards sloth and incompetence with a large share of the national wealth one that is committed to virtue?

Moreover, and this is the point of greatest interest to me, I do not think that Americans share a common definition of virtue. On the one hand, the Progresssives and secular humanists reject traditional Christianity, preferring instead a Social Gospel based on violent redistribution and capricious definitions of "positive rights," which are whatever the whims of Wall Street and the New York Times say they are. On the other hand, liberals (libertarians) and traditionalists of various kinds reject the socialism of the Democratic Party and the Rockefeller Republicans and believe in the traditional virtues of religion and freedom.

I do not think that a reconciliation is possible. America is no longer a nation with a shared sense of virtue. It is no longer a state.

De Jouvenal on the Investment Banker Bailout-Socialism of Bush and Obama

"It is far from being the case that these new aristocrats show all the characteristics of the old, or even of those who have climbed the rungs of society's ladder by their own unaided efforts. It is one thing to rise at the riser's own risks, another to owe promotion to a master's favor. A pirate like Drake, enriched by his voyages, the importance of which his ennoblement if nothing else, attests, owes everything to himself and makes a very different sort of aristocrat from a public administrator grown great in public offices often by qualities of flexibility rather than of energy.

"No absolute rule can be laid down, and there have been public functionaries who have displayed the most virile qualities. But often also, as was seen in the late Roman Empire, the functionary is only a freedman who has never shaken off the characteristics of a slave. Recruited from those freedmen, the ruling class of the late Empire became tame and spiritless.

"Towards the end of the ancient regime the French aristocracy, too, felt the effect of the ways in which most of its members had obtained their elevation in the astonishing picture of Pontchartrain given us by Saint-Simon (Pontchartrain [1674-1747]--His administration of his office was deplorable and Saint-Simon's memoirs are studded with unflattering references to him. He obtained his elevation through the influence of his father, who was Chancellor.)

"The tone of an aristocracy gets transformed by the process of internal decay, along with its restocking by elements with little in them of the libertarian spirit: securitarian elements come to predominate in it.

"It is the most pitiable spectacle to be found in social history. Instead of maintaining their position by their own energy and prestige, as men who are always ready to take the initiatives, responsibilities and risks which are too formidable for the other members of society, the privileged, whose role it is to protect others, aim at being protected. Who alone is placed high enough to protect them? The state. They ask it to defend for them the positions which they are no longer capable of defending for themselves and are therefore unfit to occupy.

"When the French nobility, recruited as it then was by the purchase of public offices, was no longer capable of excellence in war, then was the time that it got reserved to it by law the officers' berths. When to the merchants, who, like Sindbad, embarked in a voyage their entire capital there had succeeded a prudent generation of traders, the latter sought to have the king's navy secure to their travellers exclusive rights to some distant coast--from which their ancestors would have kept all intruders away themselves by their own artillery.

"...The essential psychological characteristic of our age is the predominance of fear over self-confidence. The worker is afraid of unemployment and of having nothing saved for old age. His demand is for what is nowadays called 'social security.'

"But the banker is just as timorous; fearing for his investments, he places the capital monies at his disposal in government issues, and is content to credit effortlessly the difference between the interest earned by these securities and the interest which he pays out to his depositors. Everyone of every class tries to rest his individual existence on the bosom of the state and tends to regard the state as the universal provider. And President Franklin Roosevelt cam out as the perfect psychologist when he laid down as 'the new rights of men' the right of the worker to be regularly employed at a regular salary, the right of the producer to sell stable quantities of goods at a stable price, and so on. Such are, in substance, the securitarian aspirations of our time.

"The new rights of man are given out as coming to complete those already proclaimed in the eighteenth century. But the least reflection is sufficient to show that in fact they contradict and abrogate them..."

Bertrand de Jouvenal, On Power, pp. 383-8. 1945.