I think the next big wave of tea parties is likely to be the 4th of July. I’m going to be in Boston, attending OCON. Hopefully the schedule will permit attending the tea party there. It shouldn’t be too hard to find other Objectivists to come along!

Because the Tea Party movement is a grass-roots phenomenon united more by sense-of-life than by a coherent intellectual position, it’s easy to find isolated examples of people coming from a variety of viewpoints. I view them less as an expression of an ideology than as a mass audience seeking an ideology to give expression to an incohate sense of ‘wrongness’ about the nation’s course. That’s why I think it’s important for Objectivists to be involved — the only way people seeking the answers we can provide will find us is if we’re there to talk to. If we stay away, the answers on offer will be a stale mixture of the same mush that got us into this mess in the first place.

I drove by the protest (it’s on the way home from my work). When the traffic slowed down, I rolled down my windows to try to get a sense of what was going on at the protest. I was trying to decide whether to stop and join in or not but I heard a lot of people shouting “Build a wall!” and decided to drive on. Sounds like that wasn’t representative of the overall event. Darn. I would have liked to have seen you guys there and add my voice. I had also previously heard that the event was sponsored by the Constitution Party, which is wildly misnamed, so that basically made up my mind. Any thoughts?

Arguably, the protests did start a couple of years ago — under the Porkbusters rubric, which has significant crossover with the Tea Party stuff. It’s not like there was no organized pushback against excessive government spending during the Bush administration; pretending otherwise is just attempting to rewrite history. I think the massive government bailouts were another turning point, and those only started about six months ago. Another reason why people might be more likely to protest excessive spending now is because, well, the spending has gotten a lot more excessive. Consider this CBO chart of deficts and deficit projections:

During the latter half of the Bush administration, the excessive spending curve was at least trending in the right direction, up to 2008. Contrast that with the projections for the Obama administration, where the deficit starts at roughly four times the worst year of the Bush administration, never drops below the worst year of the Bush administration, and, after 2012 trends in the wrong direction. Might that provide grounds for people to react negatively? I’d think so.

I could note that if the left were concerned with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights they should stop trying to pretend the Second Amendment isn’t part of it, and they shouldn’t have raped the First Amendment with an astroturfed campaign for campaign finance reform, but I won’t bother. I might also note that if the Obama administration were that concerned about habeas, they probably wouldn’t be doing this. And finally, I’d note that if you don’t think the Obama administration’s economic policies pose a threat to liberty that just shows that you don’t understand the link between economic freedom and political freedom. Over the long run you can’t have one without the other. Property rights are the necessary condition for the implementation of other rights; without them, the others will go away.

–Ken Barclay (Kenb in the Objectivism Seminar)

Excellent write-up, and thanks for the mention! With enough of these summaries we should definitely be able to compile a list of the best practices for future events.

Brian

http://reality.ohio.newintellectuals.org

And if they are so concerned about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, where were they when Bush was declaring that presidential powers trump all? Warrantless eavesdropping, unlimited detention of US citizens without due process, and the PATRIOT Act are much bigger threats to liberty than the recent stimulus bill.