Samizdata

Initially, when I saw the article, I wondered what on earth the editorial honchos at the Spectator Coffee House blog were doing in allowing this piece of invective to be published about the Tea Party movement in the US. But maybe those guys are actually being very smart, since the article is so bad, so unhinged, that it bears out the truth of what this Daily Telegraph columnist argues, which is that a large chunk of liberal (in the US sense) opinion is in total denial about what the Tea Party movement is about. It is just not within their mental frame of reference to comprehend ordinary voters rebelling about having to pay higher taxes for higher spending. (“But darling, how can the little people be so ungrateful?”).

The Coffee House article tries to dismiss the TP movement is nothing more than a front for religious extremism. Now I don’t particularly care for religion and as regulars will know, I tend to regard the separation of church and state as being one of the good things about the US, although the idea of such separation is not explicitly called for in the US Constitution.

But what the author of the Spectator Coffee House piece does not ask is this: if some of the Tea Partiers are playing fast and loose with American history, then are not the supporters of Mr Obama, and the bailouts, and the money printing of the Fed, also taking liberties with the intentions of the Founders? And that, surely, is what this is all about. The anger that is felt across the US among ordinary people is that their country is being bent out of shape by a group of people who hold them in contempt.

I rather liked this excellent article by David Harsanyi explaining the rise of the Tea Party:

Do I wish that Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck hadn’t declared that being gay was a choice (as if there’s something wrong with choosing to be gay)? Yes. Do I wish he hadn’t followed up by comparing a gay genetic predisposition with alcoholism? I do. If you were brainy enough to watch “Meet the Press” instead of wasting time in church last Sunday, no doubt you cringed at this primitive lunacy.

After all, what’s more consequential than a faux pas about nature and/or nurture? Who cares that Democrat Michael Bennet was busy moralizing about the cosmic benefits of dubious economic theory and science fiction environmentalism – ideas that have already cost us trillions with nothing to show for it?

Just as long as we stay focused on what’s important, right? We’re so easily distracted.

Those who believe being gay is a choice are Neanderthals. The enlightened trust science. That’s why the president appointed a science czar, people. A science czar who co-authored a textbook arguing for mass sterilizing of Americans to prevent an imagined population bomb. You know, “science.”

Read the whole thing.

Victor Davis Hanson homes in on one of the big themes of the forthcoming USA elections, which is just how many of the candidates are not life long politicians, but people who have got seriously stuck into doing other things. Not stuck in to other things so as to have a better story to tell when they eventually make that first dash for political office that they all along had planned, but seriously stuck into other things as in seriously stuck in, as in it not occurring to them that they would ever be running for any political office:

[A] rare American – war hero, author, West Point instructor, retired colonel, conservative – Chris Gibson is running neck and neck in New York’s 20th Congressional District. I don’t get involved in political races per se; but I met Chris during his one-year stay at Stanford, and found him a rare Renaissance figure – yet another of these idealistic first-time candidates without a political resume who are entering the fray to save this country. I think pundits have not appreciated the fact that this is not quite a red/blue, Republican versus Democratic race, but a historic election in which many of the Republican candidates are first-time politicians, beholden to no one, and not part of the Republican establishment.

Not having a “political resume” seems to be just what the voters are now looking for. Every time the regular politicians accuse one of these political amateurs of having said or done something amateurish, the above impression, of not being a regular politician, is reinforced.

I get the feeling that the present political class in the USA contains hardly anyone who could mend a roof or build a car or program a computer or fly a helicopter, but that in among the next bunch, there will be quite a few who can do such things. There will be more “life skills” (think of the Harrison Ford character in Six Days and Seven Nights) in American politics than there are now.

Not that I think this matters very much. The crucial thing is: will these people have the right political ideas and do the right political things? You can do something very well but then come an almighty cropper when you switch careers, just as you can be undone by a mere promotion out of what you did well to telling others how to do what you did well. If this next generation of US politicians, many of whom are now professional-at-other-things, prove to be as amateurish in a bad way as the present lot of politicians, then they won’t last long as politicians, and heaven help America.