Posted on 06/19/2014 1:01:58 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
[SNIP]
"...Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible. In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government, and state government over the federal government. Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance, and generous funding for mass transit........
More conservative states, meanwhile, would compete to go furthest and fastest in abandoning industrial-era government. Traditional urban school districts would become charter districts, in which district officials would provide limited oversight while autonomous networks of charter schools would make the decisions about how schools are run day-to-day. Parents would be given K–12 spending accounts, which could be spent on the services provided by local public schools and on a range of other educational services, from online tutoring to apprenticeships designed to provide young people with marketable skills.....
[SNIP]
.....I have mixed feelings about Teatopia. There are aspects of it that I find very attractive. Yet there are other aspects that, as an old-school sentimental American nationalist, give me pause. What I can say is that the Tea Party movement does indeed have a distinctive vision, which will come into sharper focus in the years to come. The Tea Party is not some temporary aberration......It is a real movement, and as America grows more diverse, and as American politics grows more contentious, it will grow.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Please read the entire column. I'd like to read your comments after you do. For example, does this author appear to favor a Libertarian Teatopia? If so, that raises some interesting points and some red flags.
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"Top Comment" at Slate (of over 1800):
"I'm not sure why anyone who claims not to be a teapartier would cherry-pick the least-offensive views of teapartiers and put together an article like this. Let's try the opposite.
Libertarians want to disband NASA, FDA, EPA, and all state research funding. You like space exploration and safe food? Too bad.
Libertarians are opposed to ALL environmental protection laws -- not just CO2 emissions, but also anything to do with pollution, and want to sell off all federal land. You wanted to visit Yosemite? It's been converted to a golf course.
"Less bellicose" is certainly true. Libertarians want the US to withdraw from all foreign bases and drastically reduce the army to the bare minimum needed to defend US territory from invasion. Sounds good, doesn't it? Yeah, who needs raw materials and secure trading routes. And those 3 million unemployed can no doubt find jobs clear-cutting former national parks.
The gold standard. Libertarians love gold. They've spent the last 30 years warning for hyperinflation, and of course the only way to avoid hyperinflation is to lock the value of the currency to gold. That no hyperinflation has ever materialized, and that the gold standard was abandoned because it made recessions more frequent, deeper, and longer, doesn't matter.
And the State's rights thing. The article makes a lot of noise about how it would allow California to go full social-democrat, but that's not what the libertarians of the tea party fight for. They fight for (fundamentalist protestant) religion in school and courthouse, they fight for bans on abortion and atheism, they fight for right to descriminate on race, and making sodomy illegal. They want state's rights not because it's closer to the people, but because it's too hard to implement these things at the federal level. That it effectively is the destruction of the union is just icing on the religious-right cake."
"
Someone might want to remind the ‘top poster child’ that the vision of America he fears so much and dispises was the one the country was founded on. And his views are those against it.
Paul = Putz..erh...loon...
The Slate comment is bunk!
No Libertarian wants to “ban atheism” or fight for the right to discriminate based on race.
Libertarians are all about personal LIBERTY.
It’s very interesting how much this article (published at a liberal site) bothered “Top Commenter.”
Yes. He throws that in to cover all the dog-whistle issues - as I noted, he conflates a lot of groups to make his “case.”
When your whole life consists of participation trophies, group hugs and liberals educating you (the top commenter) I can see why they are so upset.
When reality refuses to conform to your whim after all the people in your life taught you that personal truths were the only truths, it could be traumatic.
He has it bassackwards. As our framing generation knew, the ONLY way for free government to exist across extensive territory was to form a republic of republics, in which the umbrella government concerned itself with matters common to all, and left internal police to the individual states.
Obama is fast reducing the states to administrative units of the consolidated government. If this trend continues, it will soon be impossible to distinguish our government from that of any run-of-the-mill despotism.
Our free republic is fast slipping away. Elections alone cannot reverse our slide.
WHAT IF; Republicans cared about voter fraud.?
True it is a point of conversation but not worthy of action..
He's on the same page as this administration. (Love your word, "bassackwards.")
If we continue losing true legal recourse and remain powerless as checks and balances fade away, the Republic will be toast pdq.
Hasn’t that already happened.
They’re getting nervous.
Conservatives have such a SCARY agenda: ‘Leave us alone, get the hell out of our lives.’
Bookmark
Paid for by whom, I wonder. The hordes of urban trash selling crack to each other and subsisting on welfare?
Is TEAtopia anything like Kochtopia?
That “Top Comment” is a Montsanto-sized field of straw men. Nobody is talking about selling “all federal land”, the FDA, “all state research funding” (whatever that is — local agriculture stuff?), “ALL environmental protection laws”, etc.
We all know that the complaints re the EPA for example are that they have usurped Constitutional power from Congress, that complaints re the Agriculture department are that it is simply too big, that the federal government has no business being the nation’s largest operator of grazing lands, etc.
And what if we did wake up tomorrow in some alternate reality where the Libertarians had the upper hand in government and the electorate had an IQ roughly thirty points higher than it has today.
A Libertarian President simply would not simply start signing Executive Orders to disband the EPA, to “sell Yosemite”, to reduce the minimum wage, etc. He’d wait for bills from Congress to sign.
And that Libertarian Congress would need an uninterrupted number of years to start to undo the unconstitutional damage of the last century. Laws would be a dozen pages, not thousands; “Regular Order”, not backroom back-scratching, would be the order of the day, meaning bills would be a dozen pages on a single issue, debated in open session, amended in good faith, and passed or not on their own merits.
“They want state’s rights not because it’s closer to the people, but because it’s too hard to implement these things at the federal level.”
Proof that the comment author has no sense of current events or the actual history of the TEA Party or conservatism, in general.
We want to reinvigorate States’ Rights because it is the model crafted by the Founders, and is the BEST approach to government in our designed republic.
In fact, this whole thing is from Slate. That says a lot about the POV.
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