Wow. William Voegeli has written a great essay that is posted at The Claremont Institute; The Meaning of the Tea Party(via Instapundit). If you don't understand the Tea Party movement and honestly want to, and have the intellectual courage to go beyond the shallow denigration served up by many of our political and intellectual elites, then please take some time and read through it.
Excerpts don't do Voegeli's essay justice, because he provides important context that should not be missed, but here's one that gets to the heart of the matter as I see it:
The Tea Party scorn for the president's promises that all his transformative plans won't hurt a bit is about Obama, but also about something bigger. The voters are particularly unreceptive to presidential promises that sound too good to be true, because they have lived to regret listening to other such promises. Those promises were made by leaders of the new meritocracy, the one described by Brooks, in his comic sociology mode, as the "valedictocracy," populated by "Achievatrons" who "got double 800s on their SATs."
Without judging the validity of its complaint, Brooks asserts that the Tea Party movement is made up of people who "are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form a self-serving oligarchy—with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation."
We can be less impartial. The sociological but not very comic reality is that Brooks's Achievatrons wound up being distrusted by millions of their countrymen the old-fashioned way—they earned it. Our new meritocratic masters have been more conspicuously smart than wise. They know a lot, but don't know what they don't know. Their self-regard as the modern Americans who are the "natural aristocrats" Jefferson looked for has left them with an exaggerated sense of their own noblesse, and a deficient awareness of their corresponding oblige. Their expectation that the rest of us will be deferential to their expertise, like citizens of European nations that are social but not especially political democracies, has triggered the Tea Party backlash, and the resurgence of the "Don't Tread on Me" spirit.
Yes. The "geniuses" that think they can replace reasonably free markets with government policy, that are driving us on a path to be more like Europe even as it totters on the brink of disaster, have earned our distrust. They may be smart, but they are not wise and in their childish arrogance they are not listening. The last line of this paragraph sums it up nicely(emphasis mine):
The Tea Party movement's grievance against the Eternal Valedictorians cannot be reduced to the lingering grudges of those who took a remedial class here and there against those who enrolled in Advanced Placement Everything. Obama got it basically right in San Francisco before he got it gruesomely wrong. A leadership class that actually improved ordinary Americans' security and opportunities would be forgiven condescension worse than Obama's. It's when the people running the country are both disrespectful and ineffectual that folks get angry.
Most of the general public does not have an inherent disdain for our political and intellectual elites. We recognize that we need their contributions to society for civilization to advance and prosper. But we also expect them to exercise intellectual honesty, competence, and at least a measure of restraint in their leadership, and respect our contributions and freedom as well. On every major issue we face today they are failing in those areas.
The result is a broad movement of dissatisfied citizens. The issues and their importance vary from person to person, but they are united in their belief that much of our current leadership, across party lines, is incompetent, dishonest, and disrespectful. Political parties can get away with the first two most of the time, but not all three and not on the scale we are seeing today.
Where all of this will go is anybody's guess, as November is still a long way off. I will say the attempts to belittle and denigrate the Tea Party movement are sure to backfire and make it grow. The only way to stop it or minimize its effect would be for our elites to humbly admit where they have erred and return to some level of competence and common sense in governing. I don't believe they have the intellectual honesty or integrity to do either. If they did, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.
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