The Mad Tea Party

Reflecting on yesterday's outburst: I suppose what is roiling my usual sunny disposition is this gnawing sense that the American political scene is reaching a dangerous inflection point, a fork in the road where the move toward extremism may go entirely mainstream and sweep all before it, and one of the principal enablers of this dangerous trend is the Christian Right.

Student of history that I try to be (to avoid the fate which Santayana said awaited those who ignore the lessons of history), I find it useful to recall that Hitler's rise to power did not proceed in an uninterrupted straight line. Between the Beer Hall Putsch of the early 1920's and the burning of the Reichstag, a full decade passed during which Hitler languished in jail, writing his hateful manifesto Mein Kampf, resumed life as a free man, and began organizing in earnest. He was helped along enormously by the desperate economic times in Germany following the end of World War I, the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, and finally by the onset of the Great Depression. Germany, once such a proud and powerful nation, was reduced to penury by all these insults.

Similarly, the United States is itself in marked decline, and the rise of extremist religiosity, which is virtually unique among Western First World nations (it is unique, in fact), has been given impetus by these trends. The American middle class is going the way of the American buffalo at this point. Not a single net job has been added to the American payrolls since December, 2000, the last month of Clinton's second term: there were 132 million jobs then, and 131 million jobs now. During that time the American population grew by 28 million people. Jobs came and went during the Aughts of the Bush years, but they were the jobs attached to the housing bubble, construction, financing, buying and selling, and all the consumer buying made possible by the house-as-ATM phenomenon. The bubble burst and we're back to where we were a long time ago. Despite the implausibility of a 9.2% unemployment rate in the face of a 28 million person increase in population with no jobs to accommodate the growth, government propaganda claims this is the case in an effort to quell domestic rebellion. In point of fact, any practical measure of true unemployment would have to exceed 20%, as John Williams at ShadowStats consistently reminds us. This is the unemployment of the Great Depression, not the Great Recession.

Add to the massive ranks of the unemployed the large numbers of currently enlisted soldiers in the bloated military. Remember the "recruiting difficulties" of the Bush years? Where did those go? They went away with the pop of the housing bubble. Younger people coming out of high school, or a few years of college, can either move back in with their parents or sign up and fight in one of the many foreign wars the United States is currently running to provide an opportunity "to serve their country."

Thus, when the federal deficit problems go supercritical, a number of bad things are going to happen all at once. Social Security, which is already running at a deficit (7 years ahead of schedule), and Medicare are going to wobble on their foundations, and the younger generations, who can't even find jobs, are going to have no sympathy for participating in a Ponzi scheme which will never benefit them. So the entitlement programs will collapse. With general government funding in steady decline, the federal government is going to have to scale back on its foreign wars and on the defense establishment generally, which means that our Christianized fighting forces are going to come home, trained in, and inured to, violence.

Meanwhile, the political movement in ascendancy in the USA is the one most closely aligned with the Christian Right, the Tea Party. A Tea Party Caucus of 60 members in the House was formed about a year ago, with Michele Bachmann as the Chair. Michele really has it all: the Germanic name; the utter, implacable confidence that she is right (so typical of the religion-fueled); the intolerance for abortion, stem cell research and gay rights; the serene belief that global warming is a hoax; the desire to institute Intelligent Design classes in public schools "along with" the teaching of evolution (the latter soon to be phased out, of course); the obscurantist, know-nothing confidence of the mid-range I.Q. powered by her awesome belief that she is doing God's work.

Michele is running third behind noted department store mannequin Mitt Romney and the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, but that will change. If you add up the numbers for Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin you will see that they exceed those for either Romney or Perry, and the Tea Party vote is going to go for one of the two women, not both. Mitt the Mormon simply belongs to the wrong cult, and Perry will fade because, crazy as he is, he's just not crazy enough for our day and time. The Republicans want a True Believer, and Michele has the wind at her back. Wall Street won't like her (she's too uncontrollable, unlike Barack Obama), but the Koch brothers can easily fill in the gap.

I suppose that Barack Obama plays the role of Paul von Hindenburg in all of this, the hapless, well-intentioned place holder just trying to go along to get along, but who makes possible, through his very inertia, his displacement by a zealot. The Germans convinced him to run for President in 1932, as the only man capable of defeating Hitler, and Hindenburg succeeded; but then in an act of inappropriate "bipartisanship," he appointed Hitler Chancellor, which is the only opening the Little Corporal needed. Obama, through his mild, accommodating deference to zealots with their own agenda, has given away a great deal of his own power. It remains to be seen whether he can accomplish Hindenburg's feat of defeating the upstart.

Thus, my strident tone yesterday has to do with this sense that it is the irrationality of Christianity which makes possible all of this regressive movement, which is something that Sam Harris writes about in Letter to A Christian Nation. Christians might have what they perceive as the best intentions in the world, they might be "progressive" Christians like Jim Wallis (or Barack Obama), but they give cover and credibility to the extremists among them because they're talking the same language and playing the same anti-intellectual game, ceding the right to their own opinions to a bunch of dumb rules laid down by some superstitious, old Hebrew men a few thousand years ago, as when Barack Obama pretends to oppose gay marriage because of his "Christian beliefs." (And all this time I thought he was the Chief Constitutional Officer in charge of faithfully executing the laws of the land, including the First Amendment.)

And just to finish with the profound, humble recognition that nothing I say or write will do the slightest bit of good. This is building a sand castle against an incoming tidal wave.

High Tea in the Empire Room

But while I throw the term around, often (admittedly) in a pejorative tone: just what is The Tea Party? Is it presided over by the Mad Hatter, does it represent the modern-day avatars of the Sons of Liberty, is it a Support Group for Political Lunatics? Does it exist just to give people who are over 50, and white, and broke, an excuse to leave their trailers and get together in the rec room?

No, it's none of these things, actually. Lewis Carroll did not write the platform, the "Contract from America." The Tea Party might best be described as the Libertarian Wing of the Republican Party, and it's coming on strong. The party had the muscle to get rid of Robert Bennett of Utah, for example. It has nominated Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, it assisted Scott Brown in Massachusetts. It seems, really, never to lose any race it enters, and it did not really exist before 2009. It has the Big Mo', and it's for real. The Establishment Parties are scared shitless, as are their Mainstream Media sponsors. The MSM do not necessarily have any kind of foothold with the Tea Party, which means they don't know how to "access" them, and tap into them for "sources" and remarks made "on background" and "off the record." Thus, it is in the interests of the MSM to marginalize the Tea Party, because the fate of the existing media depends on maintenance of the status quo, which is a world inhabited solely by the Usual Democrats and the Usual Republicans. Whom, increasingly, absolutely everybody hates.

For these reasons alone, you kinda gotta like the Tea Party.

Let us drop the relentless snark, then, and actually look at a prototypical representation of the Tea Party platform, this one from Wikipedia, and not dissimilar from the Maine GOP platform which officially and explicitly adopts the Tea Party agenda. So here we go, with comments by your faithful blogger, a man sorta trained in Constitutional law, just as our President is sorta trained.

1. Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does (82.03%).

WS: Okay. What's wrong with that? Even if Congress just says, "Article I." Although I know what the TP is driving at. It's the absurd expansion of the Commerce Clause and the Ninth Amendment to allow any damn thing that Congress wants to do, even if the 10th Amendment suggests the states should have the primary right. Score: TP 1, Congress 0.

2. Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (72.20%).

WS: Well, see - they didn't want to say "carbon dioxide," because they don't believe in the theory (the "theory" in this case being "Science.") It doesn't have to be cap and trade, but we have to do something, and if you think the extractive and polluting industries are going to do so on their own, I have two letters for you: BP. Score: Push, because Congress sucks on this issue too.

3. Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)

Well, I don't think you need the 2/3rds requirement if you just enforce the first part. California has used that 2/3rds thing for a long time, and we're about to file B/K. But yeah - why shouldn't the federal government live within its means? Curiously, however, where is the mention of Pentagon spending? TP 1.5, Congress 0.

4. Simplify the tax system: Adopt a single-rate tax system; eliminate the internal revenue code and replace it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words. (64.90%).

Personally, I believe the correct number is 4,527 words. If there is no Internal Revenue Code, however, where do we put the 4,543 words? In the D.C. phone book? Much depends also on the "single rate." Talk about a blank check.

Unable to score.

5. Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities. (63.37%)

Let's be honest, people, if we're going to start fresh. Just come out and say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, Health & Human Services and the EPA. Score: subtract one point for disingenuousness. And please - no more Blue Ribbon Committees. That's why we never do anything. We "study" it to death. Score: TP 1/2, Congress 0.

6. Limit annual growth in federal spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%).

Not a good idea. What if there's a true emergency? The balanced budget plank covers this. Penalty of 1/2 point for missing the obvious. Score: TP 0, Congress 0.

7. Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23, 2010: Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (56.39%).

Fine with me. It's a piece of sell-out junk, and by the time it takes effect, doctors will get paid with cows. No credit, though, because the system if still completely broken.

8. Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of additional energy reserves to reduce American dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation. (55%).

This is the "burn coal," drill-baby-drill & build nukes plank. TP: -1, Congress, irrelevant.

9. Reduce Earmarks: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%).

Just eliminate earmarks. If a Congress member wants a pork deal for his state or district, don't allow it as an attachment to a general bill. Make him/her/it introduce it as a free-standing pander.. Swing and a miss.

10. Reduce Taxes: Permanently repeal all recent tax increases, and extend permanently the George W. Bush temporary reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and estate taxes, currently scheduled to end in 2011. (53.38%).

Oh hell, there's your dead giveaway. I thought we were going to have a brand new tax code. Why include a plank just to help "Bush's Base"? This plank betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Minus 2 points for overt pro-Republican sloganeering.. Score: -3.5.

As noted, there's nothing in the platform about out-of-control defense spending, illegal surveillance by the government, the abridgement of due process, or anything else that might offend Sean Hannity. Thus, the Tea Party platform lacks a coherent philosophy. It fails to address the problem of a huge military-industrial-security complex which drains $1 trillion per year from the national treasury, leads to a militarized, perpetual-war foreign policy, and infringes liberties at home. How do the Tea Party people miss this?

Not very encouraging. An aggressive, belligerent, militarized federal government which is simultaneously "small" and "limited." These conditions do not coexist in the Real Universe. As Eisenhower warned, if you persist in maintaining a huge MIC, you have to have a large federal bureaucracy to protect the citizenry from it. Otherwise, you wind up with a society as once existed in Germany between 1932 and 1945. Of course, Eisenhower was a fluoride-loving Communist.

Take me back to the days

One distinctive aspect of the dimming hopes for the Obama Presidency is that his eclipse will definitely usher in a truly nutty interregnum of bizarre politics in America. Indeed, we're well on our way. Sharron Angle is the Republican nominee for Harry Reid's Senate seat in November. Which made me recall this scene from 'Dr. Strangelove:"

Ripper: Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper: Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake: No. No, I don't know what it is. No.

Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

General Ripper's solution to the problem of flouridation was to set in motion a series of events confounding the American "fail-safe" program, thus ending the world in a nuclear holocaust. It was a bout of sexual impotence which alerted Ripper to the insidious effects of flouride in the drinking water. Was his diagnosis right, or wrong? It doesn't matter; all human life was destroyed anyway.

The theory that flouride in the drinking water was a Communist plot was promulgated chiefly by the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by the American candy manufacturer Robert Welch. Welch and his brother James invented the caramel-on-a-stick candy called the Sugar Daddy, which no doubt potentiated the formation of caries in many American mouths during the 1950's, providing as it did an ideal sugary, adhesive matrix for bacterial growth on the teeth. As I write those words, I can almost taste a Sugar Daddy in my own mouth, and feel its treacly essence against my teeth. If you bit into a Sugar Daddy, it could momentarily lock your upper and lower mandibles together. It was powerful candy. Thus, ironically (or was it?) Welch's anti-flouride campaign played directly into the hands of the Communist plot, weakening the enamel (and moral fiber) of American children.

Although my own conspiracy theory is that Robert Welch knew this when he founded the John Birch Society. He wanted us to have cavities! There is absolutely nothing easier on God's Green Earth than hatching your very own conspiracy idea, and I'm kind of proud of mine. It's just a matter of adding two plus two. Welch built on his theory with the allegation that Dwight Eisenhower, hero of V-E Day, was a paid operative of the Communist Party. The Paranoid Style of the Right Wing, the historian Richard Hofstadter called it in 1964. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Now comes this good news about Sharron Angle:

The Nevada state Assembly voted 26-16 to fluoridate the water of two Nevada counties. Angle voted against the bill.

History, as the wit said, does not necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This was really the kind of thing I was hoping for in the Tea Party Movement. Most of their ideas are incoherent, a matter of flailing in impotent rage against a Federal-Big Finance oligopoly which is strangling the country and impoverishing millions. Most fair-minded people can see that at this point; Washington's corruption is utterly complete, Wall Street is rigged in favor of a few large banks which make millions on every single trading day, the middle class is falling through the floor, the national budgetary priorities permit only war and bailouts while health care and Social Security go slowly bankrupt. There is no coherent opposition to these developments because it is essentially an Inside Job.

As long as the country is falling completely apart in the wake of the Obama debacle, however, I am at least grateful that things will be colorful and insane, the way they often were in the 1950's, the Golden Age of the Self-Made Millionaire Political Nut Job. The key point in contradistinction, however, being that America was definitely on the way up in the 1950's. Now it is just as evidently on the way down. Our incompetence and unwillingness to take our problems seriously perhaps find their best metaphor in this: the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with the oil of a foreign corporation which was under no obligation even to sell that oil to us. While our President takes lessons in Method Acting so that he can project just the right attitude of outrage to satisfy the cable news programs.

Against this kind of madness, Sharron Angle (and thank God for those two, distinctive R's in her first name! Isn't that somehow more interesting?) is diverting, appropriate and just what the doctor ordered. The know-it-alls are already laughing her off. This is a gift to Reid, they say. She's the easiest candidate to beat, because she's so loony. An anti-flouride zealot! Ha ha ha! I would say to those confident political pundits that they really need to get out more. It would not surprise me at all to see Sharron Angle in the Senate. Maybe she'll become the Majority Leader. Maybe General Jack D. Ripper did not destroy the world in vain.

Get me a ticket on an aeroplane

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.

"when Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here.

Thus spake Noam Chomsky recently, and Mr. Lewis in 1935. Oddly enough, I found myself saying something similar recently, right down to the detail about a Germany versus America comparative-awfulness analysis. I guess paranoid minds think alike. At least I hope it's paranoia. I thought to myself that Germany prior to the mid-1920's or so, or around the time of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich (1923), had been a relative bastion of Enlightenment thinking, or at least to the extent any European country could be enlightened in the aftermath of the First World War. A largely educated, cultured populace, the home of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe and Schiller. Yet it all went to hell anyway. Whereas modern America can boast Toby Keith, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin as cultural icons. One can take cold comfort there. Germany thought Hitler had been dealt with after the Putsch: he was arrested, tried and imprisoned. The hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic gradually ebbed. Progressive America thought the danger had passed with the election of Barack Obama and the marginalization of an increasingly radical-Right Republican Party. Now the Democrats grimly concede that the Republicans have a reasonable chance of recapturing the House in November. How could this happen in two years?

The United States Bank (based in the Bronx - not the Federal Reserve, but a privately chartered bank) failed in 1929, Wall Street crashed, and the Depression was on, returning Germany to its post-Versailles Treaty malaise, and setting the stage for the Little Corporal with the Chaplin mustache. Thus runs one theory of the rise of Nazism in such books as The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor, a model of lucidity and perhaps oversimplification. Yet it's pretty hard to argue with the claim that national humiliation often leads to a backlash and a search for scapegoats, especially when the country once enjoyed unchallenged preeminence. My own view is that the USA was on a long, slow trajectory of decline long before the Wall Street crash of 2007-2009, and that it's naive (and whistling past the graveyard) to think that everything going on is because Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That's just preposterous, a result of the uber-insularity of the intellectuals, largely based in New York, who dictate the first draft of history in this country. But Americans, like other peoples, prefer having specific people to blame when calamities strike. Even the weather is treated that way, if you've noticed: "The fierce storm was blamed for five deaths yesterday." (Is the storm supposed to feel remorse? Knock it off in the future?)

So if I were a Wall Street banker (and since I don't really ID myself here, LET ME ASSURE YOU I AM NOT), I would probably be reading A Tale of Two Cities as a self-help book about now, and avoiding ladies who sit on the curb knitting all day. I'm sure they all have escape plans if TSHTF. I confess I've been a little surprised at the growing strength of this Tea Party stuff, which is definitely a Right Wing movement with a survivalist, militia-backed aura about it, and that's not good at all. I thought if times got bad that Americans would simply dumpster-dive between episodes of American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, and would not notice that anything had gone wrong until the Social Security checks did not arrive one day, finally expiring of a Cheeto overdose on the couch during the final episode of "Lost."

It doesn't seem that benign. Personally, I would prefer that the United States just slump into a kind of economic mediocrity leavened with a little more fun and conviviality, sort of a North American version of Italy or Greece, without an intervening step such as Mussolini or the Greek Colonels. Just skip the Fascist crap, because it never works out. I hope Noam is being his usual alarmist self, the way he was in Manufacturing Consent, with his crazy-ass theory that a handful of mega-corporations would control most of the media outlets in America, broadcasting propaganda for a central government controlled by business interests. Okay, maybe that's a bad example of his alarmism, which seems more now like objective reality.

But you get the idea. Okay, almost time for "The Pacific," about the U.S. Marines in World War II. Damn, they were great. We won't let that effort go to waste, right?

Whither the Tea Party Movement?

The function of the Mass Media, of course, is to reduce any social phenomenon to a catch-phrase or pigeon hole so that all references to the phenomenon have a "theme" or commonly-understood meme which fits easily within the microns-thick coverage of contemporary "journalism." We often forget this (the MSM count on such forgetfulness) and thus we are prone to believing that the once-over-lightly discussion of a mass movement such as the Tea Party people is all there is to say on the subject. By now most of us here "progressive" types are inured to the characterization of the Tea Party as anti-abortion, anti-gay, "Birther" racists who are motivated mainly by a hatred of Barack Obama's African-American complexion, and use fancy "Constitutional" arguments to give their sordid movement the patina of respectability.

I think that fairly characterizes the popular take. If I've left anything out, let me know. I think one of the reasons that the MSM of the moderately progressive ilk would tend toward such characterizations (pundits such as Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann) is that they instinctively realize that they are in the cross-hairs of any such "anti-Big Government" movement, because Big Media depend on Big Government every bit as much as Big Business depends on Big Government for financial support and a favorable legislative "platform" for carrying on multi-national business or chain store oligopoly and corporatism. Their "scale" is the same as Big Government's, in other words.

Whether they always realize it or not, I think that's the sum and substance of Tea Party thinking- anti-Bigness. I suspect there's a little of that in most "progressives" as well. At the deepest psychological level, we're very tired of a mediated existence - government mediated through the TV set, political campaigns run through Internet programs, hundreds of billions here, hundreds of billions there, imagery, falseness, inaccessibility, a pervasive sense of powerlessness. I don't doubt for a moment that there is a racist element within the Tea Party movement, but, to be fair, another element contributing to the rise of an "alternative" politics is the complete failure of Barack Obama to be anything other than a conventional D.C. politician, making all the same moves as his predecessor, using many of the same people, talking the same rhetoric, covering up the same government crimes, relentlessly increasing the concentration of power within the federal government.

Here's a statement of Tea Party political philosophy from a University of Michigan supporter of the movement, published in the Daily Michigan:

The defeat of President Barack Obama’s radical agenda is one of the main focuses of this movement, which seeks to restore limited-government Constitutionalism to its proper place in our society. Tea Party members view the massive deficit spending and growing size of the federal government (with all of its new regulations that are supposed to protect people from themselves) as directly in conflict with the principles espoused by our Founding Fathers in our founding documents.

We view higher taxation as an imposition upon economic prosperity. A man’s right to earn, create and own property is the essential building block of a free market society. We view governmental mandates to buy healthcare as an imposition upon personal freedom and choice. We view cradle-to-grave entitlement programs as irresponsible and as “generational theft,” a term invented by Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.).

The Tea Party movement is all about personal responsibility, hard work, and the ability of the individual to improve his or her own condition through their efforts. We see bankrupt entities like Social Security and Medicare, and then listen to D.C. politicians promising newer, bigger programs that will “work”. And we don’t buy it. At least someone hasn’t fallen for the sugar-sweet but nevertheless insubstantial and poisonous rhetoric of “hope and change.”

At one level, this is a correct restatement of some of the principles of key Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson ("that government is best which governs least"). Yet I think the underlying theme is pretty simple: this is a new version of States' Rights -- the "Constitutional" arguments being raised do not concern the Bill of Rights so much (what's left of them) as they do the fantastic expansion of government's reach through the Commerce Clause - that legal Swiss Army knife which has permitted the federal government to regulate everything it feels like regulating. This was the focus of the Southern racists of another generation - if they could wrest control away from the central government by means of the Tenth Amendment (residual powers in the States), they could continue to segregate lunch counters, motels, train stations, water fountains, swimming pools, anything they wanted to segregate, and the Justice Department would have nothing to say about it. But the federal government was seen as the hero in those days, and the substantial majority of Americans wanted it to succeed.

That's not true anymore. The degree of public discontent with Washington D.C. has gone critical. The vast majority of Americans do not approve of Congress at all, and this is a proxy for disgust with rule from afar. So that when the central government now trots out some huge program, such as the recent health care legislation (which is a very tepid, pro-business piece of largely useless law-writing), there is an instinctive revulsion at its very promulgation. People don't want it because of where it came from.

The pols in D.C. recognize what's going on. The viability of their careers depends on recognizing which parade to jump in front of.

I personally think that re-delegating government functions to the local level could be a very positive thing. The United States, the third largest country in the world and riven by partisan and regional divides, has become essentially ungovernable. The compromises necessary to get anything done have become so extreme that nothing effective can be accomplished anymore.

It would be interesting to me if the Tea Party people begin to realize that Big Endless War, Big Government Spying, Big Terrorism Paranoia, Big Defense and other Bush-Obama Era accretions are also anathema to classic American principles. I don't see a lot of that, which makes me wonder (despite their protestations that the core Tea Party principles are not dictated by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, et al.) if the Tea Party isn't just a stalking horse for an even more Right Wing form of the Republican Party. Time will tell. At least they're kind of interesting, which is a lot more than you can say for the Democrats or Republicans.