The people who loathe the Tea Party movement most are progressive
observers with a Goldilocks problem. Because Republicans pay at
least lip service to the idea of smaller government, they have
the luxury of treating Tea Party sympathizers with the cautious
good will that smart pedestrians extend to strange dogs.
Progressives, by contrast, want to increase the scope of “public
service,” and this motivation puts them at odds with anyone
trying to pull the Constitution out of the mothballs into which
all three branches of government have shoved it, beginning
perhaps with Roe v. Wade and extending at least through
Obamacare. Enter Goldilocks: Remember how the little blonde
trespasser passed judgment on food and furniture that was not her
own? Progressives do the same thing when talking or writing about
convictions for which they have little sympathy and even less
understanding.
Some of us appreciate the checks and balances devised by
thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Other people
claim not to understand what at least one writer
calls “conservatives’ fetish for the Founding
Fathers.”
Fetish is a revealing noun that more
commonly keeps company with charms and sexual proclivities than
with the founders of our republic, but any writer can have a bad
day in the vocabulary bin, so let’s bracket objections to curious
word and look at the argument advanced by Salon
contributor Gabriel Winant as though it were serious: In the
1790s, Winant suggests, capitalism required government
strong enough to “drag people into the free market,” or they
might have been content to scratch out a living as farmers and
craftsmen who valued their privacy more than their bank balances.
That shaky thesis ignores large numbers of merchants in colonial
Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, but it’s just the setup for
Winant’s main complaint, which is that only white Protestant men
in the Founding era ever had a chance to grab for the brass ring.
To him, that shortcoming means game, set, and match for the
progressive point of view, roughly paraphrased as “what’s the
point of looking for instruction from dead bigots whose minimally
positive legacy has been obscured by generations of conservative
blather?”
But Winant’s got the wrong game going, which is why I’m
wearing a catcher’s mitt and wondering whether he can throw a
pitch over the plate. The Salon contributor thinks that
because the Articles of Confederation were unworkable and the
Constitution did not rule out slavery, the idea of limited
government is bunk. My high school Latin teacher would have
called that a non sequitur. My history teacher would have
laughed. Yet Winant writes with hilariously misplaced confidence
that we who disagree with him suffer from “uninformed nostalgia
for the 1790s as a mythical time when we were a nation of Ayn
Rand characters, all six-foot-five, straight-backed,
square-jawed, and buying and selling free of encumbrance.” One
can only grin at the multitude of Founding Fathers and mothers
(James Madison, Henry Knox, Abigail Adams, and so on) who come
nowhere near that lazy description.
Anything a student of American history might say to Winant
is mere prequel to the reactions from latter-day Goldilocks
impersonators who still cannot fathom how a Republican won the
so-called “Kennedy seat” in Massachusetts, why Rand Paul cruised
to victory in Kentucky, or when party-switching porkmeister Arlen
Specter lost in Pennsylvania.
The Goldilocks response comes (conveniently) in three
different ways. Progressives who
say “this porridge is too hot” think the Tea Party is tainted
by racism, beholden to special interests, and committed to
nothing nobler than saying no.
Progressives
who say “this porridge is too cold” think the Tea Party
movement incubates anti-government sentiment, different in degree
but not in kind from what motivated Tim McVeigh to bomb the
federal building in Oklahoma City back when the only tea party
anyone talked about involved overtaxed subjects of King George
III dumping Earl Gray and Oolong into Boston Harbor. For the
moment, these Goldilocks are content to paint the Tea Party as
calculating and cynical, but they hope for the sake of their own
moral superiority that a Tea Party rally will someday, somewhere
turn violent.
The third progressive reaction to the Tea Party movement
(“this porridge is just right”) is less common but funnier than
the other two.
Rather than dwell on the frightening implications of having
Goldilocks confront bitter gun-clinging Father Bear or
narrow-minded and annoyingly fecund Mother Bear, some
progressives stake their collective hopes on the Tea Party
movement as Baby Bear, because what is small and stupid does not
have to be feared.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal pointed
to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell as holding this point of
view, because Rendell apparently
thinks that there is no Tea Party movement, just a motley
collection of media-savvy citizens for whom “taxed enough
already” is an excuse to march on the offices of politicians
burdened by the thankless task of representing their inferiors.
Pundit Michael Kinsley appears to
agree with Governor Rendell. But as John Hayward
observed tartly, “The entrenched political elite would be
much better off if their fantasies of surly voters
driven by personal animosity toward President Obama, Harry Reid,
and Nancy Pelosi were true.” Unfortunately for that point of
view, the Tea Party movement is powerful “precisely because it’s
not shallow.”
Will the various Goldilocks impersonators on the left
figure that out? Not as long as there are chairs, lunches, and
beds to try out, and dimwitted smiles to be offered as payment
when the three bears return home to find that a trespasser
crusading for social justice has broken the “just right” chair
and eaten the “just right” porridge.
