Tea'd Off

Last week's Tax Day Tea Party was made up of four visible constituencies with very different messages:

1. Traditional fiscal conservatives concerned about high taxes and government spending in general. This was, I think, the core of the movement--Ron Paul conservatives. And it's about time they stood up and were counted. But does the Obama agenda really represent a dramatic step forward in the direction of increased taxes?
2. Nativists concerned with the growing undocumented Mexican population. It's really difficult to reconcile this viewpoint with a civil liberties-focused message.
3. Religious Right supporters concerned about recent Democratic victories, and the general drift of the culture. In particular, Obama's comment to the effect that America was not founded specifically as a Christian nation seems to have inspired considerable vitriol.
4. Republicans who are unhappy with the Obama victory. Many of the signs I've seen reflect an intense, general dislike of Obama, and no discernible policy focus.

Traditional fiscal conservatives have a legitimate gripe. Excessive taxation can become a threat to civil liberties, and while arguments for human rights and social justice also justify a civil liberties argument for social services programs, recent expenditures--trillions of dollars in corporate bailouts and overseas wars--are difficult to directly justify on a human rights basis. Corporate bailouts, by definition, are incrementally socialist--they represent the socialization, i.e. the collective ownership, of property. They may be necessary, and they did not begin with Obama, but they're a fiscal conservative's worst nightmare. Some commentators, such as the Huffington Post's Bob Cesca, don't seem to get this--they fail to realize that the concerns of at least a large segment of the protesters are acute, not chronic, and deal specifically with the bailout issue. Cesca writes:

... I'm expecting too much logic and message coherence from people who spent all of Wednesday protesting against socialism and wealth redistribution while gathered in publicly funded -- dare I say "socialized" -- parks and town squares.

The fact that the United States owns property is not new; the fact that it is bailing out major industries to the tune of trillions of dollars is new; and the fact that the former is an accepted part of our government does not mean that the latter should be accepted without scrutiny. A little socialism is an inevitable part of any government, but large-scale government intervention in the private sector is new and should generate some level of understandable opposition.

So the fiscal conservatives have a reason to be there. But what's the deal with the anti-immigration folks, the social conservatives, and the general Obama-bashers? Photos of the protests often include signs that focus on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the purported need to establish a Christian theocracy--certainly not concerns that are compatible with civil liberties. And general Obama-bashing is misplaced; his bailouts are a logical extension of the Bush administration's bailout programs, and there is no reason to believe that McCain would not be implementing the same policies had he been elected.

So the tax day protests did include elements of an intellectually honest pro-libertarian fiscal conservatism, but they also included elements advocating restrictive anti-immigration policies, an anti-libertarian social conservatism, and a downright nonsensical partisanism. In this respect, the protests might have been a snapshot of the Republican Party itself in 2009--a movement pulled in different, and sometimes opposite, directions by competing interests and competing constituencies.