Tea Partyers for Medicare
Inconsistency or philosophical conservatism?
The New York Times had a fascinating look yesterday at the demographic and ideological makeup on the Tea Party movement. Long discussed, but little studied, The New York Times and CBS commissioned a poll this month to get a detailed look at the profile and attitudes of Tea Party supporters.
The poll found that the 18 percent of Americans who associate with the Tea Party movement tend to be white, male, married, over 45 and on the “very conservative” end of the ideological spectrum. Tea Partyers express “fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, [ ] rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”
But here’s the surprising stuff. While Tea Party supporters believe the goal of their movement is reduce the size of government and favor doing so even if it means cutting domestic programs, most happily partake in the three most expensive domestic programs: public education, medicare and social security. And they assert that these programs are “worth the cost to taxpayers.”
So what gives?
One possibility is that there is an internal inconsistency in the logic of the Tea Party movement. Tea Partyers support smaller government in principle, but not in practice; that is, they are intuitively drawn to these values, but when push comes to shove — when actual programs are up for debate — they hold other values more dearly. This would make a lot of sense. The core ideas of espoused by the tea party movement — liberty and limited government — are central to the American identity. Even many liberal profess to hold them. Alternatively, maybe the Tea Party is not driven by these values at all (though they serve as a useful rallying cry). In other words, they support cutting certain domestic programs, but for reasons other than a principled belief in small government. For example, one could oppose the recent health care reform bill on the basis that it is not the best way to lower costs.
Either way, one cannot hold an overarching belief in small government while wholeheartedly supporting big government programs like Social Security, Medicare and public education. The New York Times article ends with one Tea Partyer coming to this inconsistency conclusion herself: “That’s a conundrum, isn’t it? I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.” As The Corner writer David Foster notes, “nobody ever went broke underestimating people’s capacity for self-contradiction.”
Or could there be another explanation? Could Tea Partyers oppose not all government programs, but just new government programs? Earlier this week, Jake quoted Samuel Huntington describing conservatism as a “system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.” According to this definition, one could be described as “conservative” in defending existing social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. As David Foster writes, these programs “may be fiscal nooses, but they are also promises — covenants between the state and generations of Americans who have counted on the guarantee of a government-subsidized retirement as they’ve worked, saved, and planned for their futures. And honoring long-standing covenants is as conservative as it gets.”
So there is an internal inconsistency in the Tea Party philosophy as it stands now. But it is one that can be easily remedied by clarifying the overarching principle. The Tea Party, it seems, is driven by a philosophical conservatism; concerned not with government social programs, per se, but with radical changes to the established social order. This would be consistent with the poll, which found that while the majority of Tea Partyers say the amount of taxes they pay is “fair”, their anger stems largely from the belief that the Obama Administration is taking the country in a radical new “socialist” direction.
It is fun to laugh at signs like “don’t steal from Medicare to support socialized medicine”, but it may not actually be as inconsistent as it seems. By embracing a philosophical conservatism, instead of the “small government” slogans they peddle today, Tea Partyers would be making a coherent and historically grounded argument about the direction of American politics.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user paragon used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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