Tea Pot Dumb

More thoughts on the conversation I had recently with my brother. I don't disagree with him about the idea that there's an argument going on about the role of government at the center of our politics. There always has been, after all, from the writing of The Federalist Papers to the present. My disagreement is with the idea that it's within the teabaggers that the heart of the discussion resides.

If it's a serious movement with a serious argument, why is it that the candidates they produce are such uniformly unqualified nutjobs? Surely a movement with serious intentions based on serious thought ought to be able to produce better candidates. Aren't there anti-establishment activists who know what they're talking about? Must there not be at least a few small-government advocates acceptable to the teabaggers who aren't liars, who aren't religionists, who have proposals that add up with simple arithmetic? (Local political ad, word for word: "John Koster's plan: cut taxes, cut wasteful spending, balance the budget." That's his plan? His plan? What, it came to him in the middle of the night like an alien probe, after which he leapt up [probe still dangling?] and wrote it down in a camomile-infused moment of clarity? Stop the presses! There's news! We have a plan!)

Which is not to say these people won't win. Quite likely, sadly, the opposite is true. But that's exactly my point. Can anyone imagine Christine O'Donnell or Sharon Angle actually legislating? If the point of teabaggerism is, as my brother suggests, to advocate the limitation of government like good libertarioconservatives, why can't they produce candidates capable of presenting thoughtful plans?

Or is the idea to take government down from within, by populating it with incompetents?

Could be: since Ronald Reagan they've known their economic dogma is made of smoke; thoughtful people simply no longer buy it. So the only hope for the people behind the movement, the ones bankrolling it from the sidelines to complete the ravishing of the economy for their benefit and at the expense of those they've convinced to take up their teabags is to aim their rhetoric at the last group of people who'll believe it: The credulous, the selfish, the easily deluded, the criers for simple solutions and faith-based politics.

And, as if conjured by witchcraft, they appear on the scene, stirred on cue and unshaken by fact: Beck, Palin, Bachmann, Smith, Paul, O'Donnell, Brewer, Angle, DeMint, Bought-and-sold-Boehner...

That there's a congenital disagreement in the country about the role and size of government is nothing new. What is new is the extent to which the conservative side has all but given up making rational arguments, as if conceding they can't win on merit. What's new is that they've ceded their ground to the crazies, hoping they'll carry the bucket without knowing the water has been spoken for long since. The Tea Party, in other words, represents no philosophy at all: it's the unknowing surrogate for people who prefer to dole out their money from the shadows. And who, thanks to the most activist Supreme Court in history, are doing so with abandon.