Tea and Simplicity

I don't consider myself a nuanced political thinker. In discourse about anything political I can be rated on the subtle thinking scale somewhere between Plato and Fox News. Closer to the Fox News end, really, but sadly not close enough. I am too agile a thinker to truly grasp one of the major recent developments on the political scene ...

But then not even Plato would understand the current 'Tea Party' movement.

No amount of erudite political acumen could fully explain the phenomenon. It helps to just blank your mind, go with the flow, and become a receptive receiver. (Hey, it works for Fox!)

For, you see, this Party is not about 'Tea', as in 'let's all have some nice tea and crumpets', which sounds a very constructive act - rather it's about tearing down and throwing out. Cleaning out the governmental closet, as it were, and maybe throwing out the baby with the bath water too.

My original concept of the 'Tea Party' was as a political umbrella for people who were upset with the growing national debt, and all the bad things that make it grow. With a few people added who were disaffected with the partisan shout-fest in Washington.

Partly true, no doubt, but not true enough ...

In reality, or so it seems to me, the Party of the Tea is about über-libertarianism and constitutional absolutism, the latter concept something I thought abandoned after Burr shot Hamilton. To the Tea Partiers, the Constitution is carved in stone, like the 'Ten Commandments', and largely by the same Author. To them, there is no room for interpretation or logical expansion in the language of the Document. What it says it says, and how it was first interpreted is what it means.

To those Tea-ers, their fundamentalistic interpretation of the Constitution leaves many modern governmental functions without basis or reason for existence. Goodbye Medicare, Goodbye Social Security. Neither are in the original mandate. Ditto the Federal Reserve. Supreme Court? Only if it's not 'activist'. Space Program? There will be no 'Right Stuff' unless it's for common defense.

About all that would be left the federal government is to provide for the national defense, build some roads, and levy a few taxes.

But wouldn't that leave a lot of gaps in our society's safety net? What about caring for the elderly, the disabled, or the impoverished sick? The Tea Partiers will tell you that is up to the individual States to implement, if they really think it necessary. No matter this was tried back in the Confederation experiment, post-Revolution but pre-Constitution, and found not to work very well at all.

I guess the Partiers just want to be able to have somewhere to go if the State they live in decides to pass a law they don't like. The more those hated laws are made at the state level the more options the Partiers have to move and still stay in the US. Slick, especially if you own your own U-haul.

As I said, though, I may have this all wrong. I may be figuring in too much complexity in my analysis, when it's really utterly simple. And I don't own a U-haul.