Liberals often scoff when conservatives, supporting the
principle of federalism, say that most people care more about
government close to home than they do about government in
Washington. But down in southern Alabama at least, Tea Partiers are
acting in perfect concert with those conservative principles.
The Tea Party in Alabama’s coastal counties, Mobile and
Baldwin, is called the “Common Sense Campaign.” The name is
appropriate. In the four months I’ve been back down here, I’ve been
extraordinarily impressed by how active it is. Regular meetings,
weekly or near-weekly. Rallies. Speeches. The most active thread of
email messages I think I’ve ever seen. And, most impressively,
active letter-writing and phone calling, backed by energetic
research, about fairly complicated issues that aren’t high on
national radar screens — issues where most of the governmental
decisions are made at the state or local level, exactly as
federalist principle would suggest.
Three issues in particular are receiving the bulk of their
attention. (The idea in this column is not to explore those issues
in depth, but just to explain the Tea Partiers’ interests.) The
first is the growing burden that Medicaid is putting on state
budgets, a burden that will get almost geometrically worse when
Obamacare is fully implemented. Former gubernatorial candidate,
state senator, and state board of education member Bradley Byrne
has been spreading this message, along with a number of creative
suggestions for effective, fair-minded cost savings. What’s
admirable is the follow-up the activists have shown, with highly
focused letter-writing to state officials, plans for seminars and
rallies, and calls to officials in other states to find out how
they are handling such issues. Related to the Medicaid issue is
Alabama’s decision to go ahead and start setting up the state
health insurance exchanges as mandated by Obamacare — a decision
the Tea Partiers abhor. These are not simple topics, but the local
activists are tackling them with gusto.
The second issue is educational. The Tea Party is on fire
in opposition to state adoption of the national Common Core Standards, which are
advertised as “voluntary” but which the Obama Administration
already has begun co-opting by tying federal funding to their
adoption. Not that there is anything wrong with standards — but
Alabama already, while almost nobody was looking, had adopted high
educational standards and vaulted from the bottom to the middle of
the pack (by various measures) among states in terms of educational
performance. The problem the Tea Partiers see with national
standards is exactly their potential for federal co-optation, and
from co-optation to various abuses of the “politically correct,”
socially liberal variety conservatives always fight against. It
would be better, say the activists, to keep improving standards on
our own — and to publicize Alabama’s high standards — than to
specifically affiliate with a national movement, no matter how well
intentioned (Jeb Bush is a prime mover), that quite clearly has the
potential to be abused down the line.
Finally, some of the locals are particularly exercised
about something
called “Agenda
21,” which is a vague-sounding United Nations wedge aimed, the
activists believe, at opening the door to massive regulations, land
grabs, and various aspects of one-worldism. The activists are
probably right to worry. What’s most interesting is that the local
Tea Partiers are most focused not on some vague international
threat, but on specifically how, if at all, Agenda 21 will affect
local or state land-use policies and zoning. Again, this is not
Chicken Little, sky-is-falling sort of alarmism, but instead a
sensibly focused example of watchdogs who know what they are
watching for.
These aren’t the only issues, of course, that members of
the Common Sense
Campaign care about. They are rightly just as exercised at
federal overspending and other outrages as are any of the national
Tea Party groups (and conservatives in general). But in their
principled localism, the CSC members uphold some of the greatest
intellectual and attitudinal traditions of modern
conservatism/classic liberalism. Their example is a heartening
thing to observe.
