When the Tea Party took control of the House of Representatives in 2010, my worry was that they would sell out and become status quo conservatives — like most Republican politicians who have paid lip-service to laissez faire. After the 2011 debt crisis, my fear is precisely the opposite. The Tea Party House is too idealistic, too unwilling to compromise.
It seems to me that most Tea Party House members have been influenced (at some distance, granted) by Murray Rothbard, who suggested that you must insist upon total capitalist freedom right now. They have also been influenced by Ayn Rand, who likened compromise to poison. This must make a lot of libertarians happy, but it makes me both scared and happy. There are two reasons why I am scared, and one very different reason why I am happy.
First, as someone who believes in practical idealism, I believe that change must be enacted slowly or it will be doomed to long-term failure. The government has been quasi-socialist since the New Deal, and the American economic system has developed in such a way that it is designed for government to play a role. Simply eliminating all government intervention overnight instead of gradually phasing statism out would almost certainly harm the economy and worsen the recession, as the system would be unable to cope with the gaps in its structure.
Going from freezing to boiling instantly is a shock to any system, whereas increasing temperature gradually enables an organism to adjust and adapt. If the United States government shuts down before the free market has a chance to adapt and develop systems to replace government functions, the result will be chaos.
Second, if the Tea Party House refuses all compromise and continues to insist upon an idealism-or-nothing approach, the American public may become afraid of the dangers of radical change, and popular sentiment may easily turn against the Tea Party and libertarianism. The Tea Party and libertarianism are not identical, but the Tea Party movement is essentially a populist lowbrow form of libertarianism. If the Tea Party brand becomes unpopular it could set the libertarian movement back decades. The majority of the voting public can easily get scared by apparent extremists who threaten economic calamity in the name of abstract ideals.
This is so even though the Tea Party represents the very best ideals embodied in a long history of American patriotism dating back to the American Revolution. As a case in point, many Tea Party House idealists voted against the debt ceiling compromise, meaning that they wanted the government to default on its debt, which would have triggered a doomsday scenario for the American economy. I suspect that this scared many mainstream voters.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the above, I am actually happy as well as scared that the Tea Party House has taken such an insane approach. The Tea Partiers are crazy, but the modern liberals and conservatives are crazy too, and our insanity is better than theirs. A debt default would have been no more insane than ObamaCare or the war in Iraq. Trillions of dollars of unchecked growth in entitlement spending and more tax-and-spend Democratic budget deficits over the next decade would do more harm than a temporary government shutdown. Lofty idealism is a breath of fresh air, given the stagnant corruption that has emanated from Washington for the past century, and “much must be risked in war” (to quote The Return of the King).
I am happy with the Tea Party House’s strategy because the Tea Party could easily lose the House in 2012 and the movement might stall and dissolve, so this 2011–12 era may be our one and only opportunity to shrink government and restore fiscal sanity. Therefore the Tea Party should continue to fight to cut the government as much as possible, and make it difficult for future Congresses to undo its achievements, because the Tea Party may not last forever. The Tea Party House could be our one shot at saving America from an Obama-led collapse into socialism. In the context of my happiness over the Tea Party House’s unyielding idealism, a little bit of fear isn’t really such a bad thing after all.
