Tea Party Rage

Andrew Sullivan offers insight into the Tea Party Right's incoherent rage with two posts on The Daily Dish. The first frames the logical inconsistency of their treatment of policy.

I confess to staying baffled by this whole movement. I spent many years wailing about spending under Bush, and the Tea Party was largely silent. I'd like to see serious cuts in entitlements, means-testing of social security benefits, and sharp reductions in military spending ... to avoid the default that could one day come when we least expect it. The Tea Party has proposed no such entitlement cuts - let alone defense. Because taxation is historically low, and because we're never realistically going to tackle the debt without more revenues, I also favor some tax increases - on carbon, and on consumption. The Tea Party is opposed to any new taxation. So at that point, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to respond.

The second goes beyond the cognitive dissonance of Tea Party policy and offers another explanation.

What you see is the predominance of acute alienation - the opposite of a natural conservative at peace with the world as it is - and the intensity of emotional rage it provokes. I would add one thing to this analysis. The Bush-Cheney presidency was, in some respects, the perfect pseudo-conservative administration. They waged war based on loathing of the experts (damned knowledgeable elites!); they slashed taxes and boosted spending for their constituencies, while pretending to be fiscally responsible; they tore up the most ancient taboos - against torture - with a bravado that will one day seem obscene; and they left the country in far worse shape than they found it. Throughout all this, the Tea Partiers supported them. So how do they manage the cognitive dissonance that two failed wars, a financial collapse and a debt crisis have brought? How do they deal with the fact that their beloved president was manifestly the most incompetent and disastrous in modern times? They blame it on the next guy.

Blind emotion makes sense to me as an explanation of the logically incoherent treatment of policy and the over-the-top hatred of Barack Obama by this group. Their two most visible leaders, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, regularly mangle the facts according to the fact-check websites. The popularity of these two with the Tea Partiers strongly suggests that the movement is driven by emotion rather than reason.

--Ballard Burgher