Tea parties and terrorism

Robert Wright, blogging for the New York Times, argues that the Texas IRS plane crasher is “the first tea-party terrorist.” For the record, I’m inclined to agree that whether we call someone a terrorist or not isn’t particularly important.  It has little moral resonance, since flying a plane into a building is clearly wrong independent of it being terrorism.  I don’t see how the designation really has any policy relevance, either.  Wright’s argument concludes by noting that if we do not overreact by labeling the attack “terrorism,” we’ll have short-circuited the purpose of the attack, which was to spur an overreaction.  Plausible enough, but I still think that nutjobs will be nutjobs regardless of how the last one was labeled.

Wright outlines some reason that Stack did and did not hold core Tea Party themes, then concludes:

In the end, the core unifying theme of the Tea Partiers is populist rage, and this is the core theme in Stack’s ramblings, whether the rage is directed at corporate titans (“plunderers”), the government (“totalitarian”) or individual politicians (“liars”).

I think this is getting at the core moral issue. It seems uncontroversial to me that threats, veiled or not, against the physical well-being of a sitting president are sedition, and promises to commit acts of violence in the service of toppling the state are treason (terrorism or not).  These threats are present in spades in the TP movement.  In fact, I can’t really identify what separates TPers from mainstream Republicans except this tenancy towards revolutionary delusion.

-John

Related posts:

  1. Was Fort Hood terrorism?
  2. Parties versus principles
  3. Does terror have a nationality?
  4. Krugman on the party divide
  5. Iran and just revolution

February 25, 2010 · Filed Under Uncategorized

Share

Comments

Leave a Reply




  • Editors

    Jacob Bronsther is a law student at NYU, a former Fulbright Scholar to Mauritius, and a graduate of Cornell University. He has an MPhil in Political Theory from the University of Oxford.

  • Sam Gill is a consultant in Washington and a graduate of the University of Chicago. He studied Political Theory at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

  • Marc Grinberg is a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. government and a graduate of Princeton University. He earned an MPhil in Political Theory from the University of Oxford.

  • John Rood is the founder of Next Step Test Preparation and a graduate of Michigan State University. He has an AM in Political Theory from the University of Chicago.

  • Luke Freedman is a student at Carleton College, pursuing a double major in Philosophy and Political Science.


  • Sign up for the TPP Weekly Rewind



  •

  • Share us