MSM Is Wrong, The Tea Party Is Not Dead

Well, the MSM is in full cry declaring the Tea Party dead in the water because Ken Cuccinelli lost and Chris Christie won.  I happen to think this isn't even close to true, but let's assume for a minute that it is.  What are the implications?

Mainly, that we are that much closer to going broke.  The Tea Party represents the only political force that is even remotely concerned about federal solvency and the slow demise of our economy under our crushing debt.  If you are a small government conservative, who or what, exactly, is going to get us where we are going?  John Boehner?  Mitch McConnell?  Sorry, but nope and nope.

If the Tea Party is dead, the odds of a national fiscal crisis go way up.  Beyond that the slow ongoing erosion of liberty will continue.  Cancelled health insurance, followed by a new, more expensive policy is just the beginning.  The end of the road are things like nationalized healthcare, Argentina-style theft of private assets, etc.  All this is bad enough, but this degree of statism always carries with it a fatal case of civic rot.  The Tea Party is nominally concerned about our financial trajectory, but in essence is about our overall civic health.

The Tea Party Versus The Rot

In his tiny, focused classic Communism Richard Pipes illuminates the moral rot that infected the Soviet Union after years of Communism: "Lying became a means of survival, and from lying to cheating was one small step. Social ethics, which make possible a civil society, were shattered. No moral onus was attached to stealing. This manner of thinking led to the corruption of the whole nation."

In his great article delving into the Greek sovereign debt crisis, Michael Lewis describes a similar rot that has infected quasi-socialist Greece: "The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing."

The Soviet Union and modern Greece do not share this degraded civic state by coincidence. Complete civic rot is a feature of socialism, an unavoidable result of that governing system's destructive force. Thus Ludwig Von Mises rightly notes that socialism is not an alternative to capitalism, it is an abyss: "A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings." (HT: Carpe Diem)

Don't think it can happen here? Just take a look at the size and broken state of our entitlements, our public pension crisis, the bitter struggle emerging between those who finance the system and those who feed off of it and how that struggle has polluted our politics. Politics in America today is not about solving our problems, it is solely about taking away and handing out money. It is simply about who finances what for whom and the rot is setting in; you can't have a civil discussion about fiscal priorities - i.e. Chris Christie has to wage all out war to keep from spending billions more than the state has, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino gets sued by the County Board to stop from cutting $160 million out of a $1.8 billion budget. You can't say "wait a second" regarding the gargantuan and growing expenditure of resources that we don't have without incurring the vicious ire of whole swaths of our society. Question teacher pensions in New York and you can be sure that transit cops in California and sanitation workers in Seattle will hate your guts. It's early but the rot is showing early signs of arriving on these shores. The Tea Partiers see it, that is why they are so passionate, that is why they emblazon themselves with Founding Era garb and slogans, and why they are so keen to find ways to succeed - they are out to cleanse the system before the rot gets worse. It is a restoration project and the stakes are so high. When people say we could "end up like Greece" they are talking about unsustainable debt levels but the real danger is not the debt but the civic rot that lies underneath that allows the debt to pile up so high that it buries the nation. Well before we get to Greek-like debt levels, the rot will be so bad that there will be no turning back. The Tea Party is going to ensure we don't get remotely close to that point.

The Tea Party is a new political movement and as such it will display some political immaturity from time to time and it will have teething pains, but beyond the core positions of smaller, constitutionally-faithful government ask yourself - is what we need as a nation really more of the high art of political sophistication?  Isn't that what got us to this pass?  The Tea Party may be lacking in  political strategy expertise, but that, to me, is one of its great appeals - it's just people, wanting government to answer to them, not the other way around.

I don't see that notion as dead in the water, not by a long shot.  And, trust me, this isn't the first time the MSM will have gotten it wrong.

UPDATE:  Christie bucking up the Tea Party?