Tea Parties with Aristocrats (or not)

I have never understood how somebody who isn't rich could support conservative economic principles. I've always been baffled by the fact that people who work so hard to keep their families just barely above water could be supporters of the "free market." How could it not be blindingly obvious that the free market is a tremendous bully that doles out foreclosures to some and mulitple, multi-million dollar palaces to others? How could any human being be so superior to others that they deserve that kind of extravagance? How could any human being be so inferior to others that they deserve that kind of marginalization? And how could so many Americans not see through that?

I assumed that the only way this could have happened was that conservative politics roped people in with "social" issues, things like abortion or gay rights to which people had strong emotional and religious connections. Then the conservatives put their economic policies in the fine print and asked Americans to sign on the dotted line with assurances that the rest was just technical details. Call it the predatory lending style of political consensus building.

But the tea party furor doesn't really support my theory. Here is what appears to be a grassroots movement of hard-line conservatism that is animated precisely by economic issues.* These people have read the fine print, and they love it! So what gives?

Reading Politics of Inequality has given me perhaps a little more intellectual sympathy for the right wingers. Michael Thompson talks about how the fundamental impulse of the American Revolution was a rejection of European feudal society. America was going to be this bold new experiment in democracy. It was supposed to be the antithesis of aristocracy and entrenched political/social/economic power. This was a country of free individuals able to pursue their own destinies as individuals and as a new society. And this was a republic built on contracts, freely entered into: a social contract with the state, and economic contracts between individuals. Contracts meant choice and control and fluidity, as opposed to systems built on feudal obligations and encrusted tradition.

In some contexts, these ideas from our founding fathers (and mothers) make me feel gosh darn patriotic. When discussing political rights, I am as heartily anti-aristocratic as the next American. Birth should not determine one's right to participate in the political process. Where I begin to take issue is the assumption that our economic system guarantees a similar level of freedom and access. I don't believe that it does, or ever did. However, I can see how the anti-aristocratic sentiment could spill over into the economic sphere and rally people's support for "free" markets. There could be some people out there who feel that government attempts to intervene in the economic system amount to state interference in those private contracts we hold so dear. And if the government seems like some external, alien force run by disconnected elites arbitrarily impinging on your freedoms and taking your hard-earned property... well, that sounds alarmingly like an aristocracy. In this particular instance it happens to be an aristocracy that claims to have the common good of the public as its chief interest, but that's rhetoric that I don't even always buy into.

So it makes good sense that the tea party people have derived even their very name from an event of the earliest days of our republic's founding. They are hearkening back to a very fundamental American ideal of individual liberty against entrenched elitism. I still disagree with them quite intensely, but at least I can see a little more common ground. Although I heard a suggestion on the radio this morning that if we really want people to come together to discuss ideas and work out their grievances that we should have a beer party to lift people's spirits a little more than tea. Gotta say, I kinda like that idea!

*At the same time, liberals, in an effort to shore up an eroding economy, are looking more pro-business than I ever recollect seeing. But that's a topic for a different day. Actually, I already wrote about that. http://woperchild.blogspot.com/2009/06/perverse-production-incentives-and.html

Thompson, Michael. The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Inequality in America. New York: Columbia U, 2007.