This from that bastion of liberal lies and smears, Forbes.
On every question asked about the burden of taxation, size of the federal government and if taxes are moving up or down, they were simply drastically wrong. That’s strange for a group who’s stated core issue is taxes. One might even think that someone is intentionally trying mislead them in order to get them to vote against their own economic interests. Who might that be?
On March 16 the Tea Party crowd showed up for yet another demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington. Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions…
The first question that was asked concerned the size of government. Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009…
Tuesday’s Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944…
According to calculations by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional committee, tax filers with adjusted gross incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 have an average federal income tax burden of just 1.7%. Those with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 have an average burden of 4.2%…
I think I was being a bit snarky, I’ve always assumed that some powerful interests were intentionally trying to co-opt the Tea Partiers. They may have started as an organic populist movement, but once wankers like Dick Armey’s Freedomworks got involved they just became part of the noise machine. Now they’re just another means of echoing mindless talking points at the highest possible volume.
I thought the work of Michael Oakeshott captures a lot of the basis of conservatism in his work with this quote:
“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” – (cribbed from his Wikipedia page)
Liberal and progressives are more or less utopian in outlook and temperament. If there was just the right law coercing the “correct” behavior all would be well and we’d all march arm in arm towards human perfection. It’s impractical, but it does tend to drive society forward, dragging the Oakeshotts of the world along with them, kicking and screaming.
In the modern American political scene, conservatism has devolved into a sort of willful ignorance, a modern “no nothing” nihilism that’s profoundly anti-intellectual and disturbingly ugly. The Tea Partiers and clowns like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh typify it. It’s noting new, it’s all happened before and will again. They’ll have their populist anger co-opted and become a part of that which they hated at the onset.
I *promise* I’m not being snarky here, but I think it is a mistake to assume the Tea Party folk are somehow invested in having objectively correct information or making rational arguments.
From the conservative POV (how I was raised), if you’re right you know what’s right, and whatever you do to get the right outcome is, de facto, right. I suspect there is more than a little Calvinism-style Elect personality at play here.
The wild anger is probably best explained by
Hofstadter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
The gentlest and most perceptive description of the differences between liberal and conservative moral systems is described by Haidt. He suggests that conservative “morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. ”
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
While I regard those three additional values to be primitive, chauvinistic, superstitious caveman stuff it goes a long way to helping me understand conservative approaches to problems.
Sorry to spew a bunch of barely connected stuff. This stuff has been on my mind and I thought it might be grist for your readership.