Tea Party Madness

We live in strange times with Birthers to the right of us and Truthers to the Left, but little seems as odd to me as a state government, that of Arizona, taken over by teabaggers. The Tea Party is mad, a topic taken up by J. M. Birnstein, a philosophy professor writing for the NY Times Opinionator (called to my attention by John Cascone). Birnstein's conclusion is that teabaggers are enraged because they dearly love the ancient American myth of individual autonomy. Arizona's Tea Party activists are rightwing anarchists, a "libertarian mob." They want to deny vaccination, school their children at home, treat emotional problems with beer, and treat medical problems with water and chanting. They want to be left alone, yet they find themselves dependent on government for road maintenance, fire safety, social security checks, Medicare, etc. And government is tottering, calling attention to itself.

Arizona is short of everything but retired Republicans. The state lacks industry. Liquid life, sucked from ground wells, is running out--which why some cities are cutting down their woods. As State Senator Sylvia Allen put it, trees were "stealing Arizona's water supply." Madness.

Birnstein's hypothesis is that events have demonstrated to teabaggers the absolute dependence of everyone on government action, and this is exactly what the teabaggers do not want to know. Social Security was fine as long as we ignored it and pretended to be autonomous. That was the social bargain: pretending to be independent of others. Today the teabaggers cannot ignore the role of government, and like the rest of us they can't control Washington. Hence we see rage and madness produced, Birnstein writes, not by politics but metaphysics. The Tea Party, he points out, "wants nothing." It expresses a nihilistic fury of destruction. At its peak, it breaks up meetings.

As apt as Birnstein's analysis is, it's obviously incomplete. The July Harper's published an article by Ken Silverstein that helps fill in the picture. Arizona's legislature, he points out, is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists and cranks. They have to respond to the country's worst budget crisis. Naturally, they fired hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors, saving $25 million and costing $174 million in lost revenue. They sold their capitol building and then rented it back. Madness.

Arizona is the first (and one hopes the only) state actually taken over by tea party activists, who dominate the local Republican Party. These people (mostly old white people) are, Silverstein writes, fixated on taxes and immigration; and they control the Republican primaries. They believe that government exists to help the undeserving. Funding for GED programs "has been reduced to zero."

Much of the anger, of course, has been directed at Latinos. Some of this is racism. Some of it is a hatred of diversity--which is why it is now illegal to teach Latino children about their heritage in the public schools. Teabaggers want their (imaginary) country back. They feel the rage of betrayal. They hope they can stop change and live in an unchanging world.