Fall, 2013, "The Tea Party and the Constitution," Claremont Institute, Charles R. Kesler
"The original Tea Party was neither a political organization nor a populist movement. It was a one-night stand, an evening uprising. Nevertheless, the young John Adams judged it so intrepid and consequential as to mark "an epocha in history."
The British government agreed. Lord North warned the Commons that a turning point had been reached. "We are now to establish our authority," he said, "or give it up entirely." We all know how that turned out.
Both the old and the new Tea Party stand for resistance to unconstitutional power. In 1773 the Tea Partiers opposed the Tea Act, which violated their rights as Englishmen and as men. Their counterparts today fight against Obamacare, a much worse law. And they have enough orneriness left over to confront many other usurpations by the Obama Administration as well as several inherited from Bush II.
Modern liberalism can neither fathom nor tolerate the Tea Party. Liberals don't believe in a right of revolution against liberalism. They consider progress as they define it to be irreversible. For example, here is Barack Obama at his most peremptory, calling in 2009 for nationalized health care. "I am not the first president to take up this cause," he told Congress, "but I am determined to be the last."
As liberals see it, conservatism's job is to conserve liberalism. When it threatens to overturn a program like Obamacare, then the Right ceases to be conservative and becomes radical, indeed revolutionary insofar as it threatens not just a cabinet department or two but the whole religion of one-way leftward progress and the whole worshipful establishment built around that faith.
Even a smart liberal like Sam Tanenhaus considers the Tea Party to be the last gasp of a dying conservatism that has ceased to be Burkean and become, in his word, "Jacobin," that is, revolutionary in the bad, French sense. Of course, the Tea Party's very name refers to a revolution—but to the American Revolution, not the irrational French one. Tanenhaus doesn't see much of a difference because he seems to dismiss as extremist any form of politics that doesn't go with the evolutionary flow, and that appeals to universal and timeless principles of justice. One is tempted to say that he rejects natural rights as firmly as John C. Calhoun did and for a similar reason: they endanger the ancien regime, which in our time is liberalism.
If the Tea Party is revolutionary, it is so only in the traditional American sense: it wants to revolve back, to return to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence as the basis of government. This is the deepest reason why the Obama Administration [and the GOP] has reacted to this Tea Party as Lord North did to the original. If Obamacare is overturned, then liberals will have lost control of the future and hence of their legitimacy; and if they lose the future, they will lose the present, too. So the Tea Party must be stopped at all costs.
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What the battle over Obamacare has helped to reveal is that it isn't just two clashing interpretations of the same Constitution that divide liberals and conservatives today. It is increasingly two different constitutions that are locked in conflict. Liberals support the "living constitution," which regards the bulk of the 1787 document as dysfunctional under modern conditions, hence obsolete if not, indeed, dead. They recognize only a few phrases in a few amendments as truly vital.
Conservatives cling to the old Constitution (as amended) not merely because it is old but because its principles of justice, based in human nature, are correct, and because its institutions and customs wisely anticipate both human greatness and human baseness. From this point of view, it is the passage of Obamacare—with its hasty party-line votes, corrupt side-deals, and brazen lawlessness—and not its attempted repeal, that amounted to a constitutional dysfunction.
Both the Tea Party and the Obama Administration understand the stakes. But it will take a lot more than an evening's Tea Party to win this struggle." via Mark Levin show
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Comment: ObamaCare and everything else happened because the GOP merged with the democrats. The US no longer has a two party system. People joke about things being "Bush's fault" but ObamaCare really is. He did such a terrible job and destroyed the GOP so completely that there were almost no Republicans left in the House of Representatives after the 2008 elections. I don't accept that nothing can be done about it. I realized in 2002 that something terrible was happening. The Bush crowd was completely detached from the country and from millions of us who are right of center. They cavalierly trashed the country and a generation, handed us to the radical left, and to this day aren't bothered about it. Rupert Murdoch even rewarded a bunch of them with perches on Fox News. Mr. Murdoch is eager for the left to remain in power. The term Tea Party is shorthand for not accepting all this. Angelo Codevilla explains the Ruling Class and the US today in the
2/20/13, “As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voters Are Orphaned,” Angelo Codevilla, Forbes
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“Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand submission as did the royal courts of old.”…
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"No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place."...
July-August 2010, "America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution," by Angelo M. Codevilla
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"The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary."...
"Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind.
Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it."...
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10/20/11, "The lost decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute (2001-2011)
"Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand submission as did the royal courts of old."..."
Again and again, the American people are forced to confront
the fact that its ruling class is not on its side." (subhead, Public Safety)
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In 2007 Peggy Noonan wrote about the Bush crowd destroying the GOP.
Conservatives had long since been kicked out of the GOP by both George Bushes but didn't seem to realize it, were hanging around like "battered wives:"
6/2/2007, "Too bad," Wall St. Journal column by Peggy Noonan:
"What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker -- "At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic -- they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."
Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill -- one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions -- this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position -- but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate....
If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done -- actually and believably done -- the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom -- a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance.
They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time."
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