Tea in the water

Well, earlier this month in Ames, Iowa, a few thousand Republicans expressed their views on presidential candidates, and Tim Pawlenty did not attract enough admirers. He dropped out. Michele Bachmann did better, but so did Ron Paul. While not identified with the Tea Party movement as Bachmann is, Paul actually has been raising concerns about our debt long before they did. So the significant message from Ames is that the Tea Party is alive and well among some in Middle America. Pawlenty just could not connect with Tea Partiers. He and they come from two different psychological points of view. Pawlenty is studied and calculating -- a corporate lawyer -- and they are emotional and often vengeful. Emotions, not money, are the mother's milk of politics -- money just finds ways of getting them out and about among the public. Emotions do drive us over the short run, but great people and great nations need to think more about the long run as they make decisions. Emotions need to be balanced with good thinking if success is to be achieved. For example, if we had made changes to Social Security and Medicare in the early 1980s, when today's debt crisis in those huge government programs was accurately predicted, then today we would not have a debt crisis and our government debt would be at no risk of downgrade to the strategic advantage of the Chinese. But we didn't act back then, kicking the can down the road to today. And today we are so emotionally dysfunctional in our politics that we, again, can't make the right tough decisions. To me, there are good emotions and bad emotions. Good emotions lead to good results; bad emotions to bad results. Good emotions lead us to compassion, to love of neighbor, to self-sacrifice and hard work, to good thinking, to beauty, to goodness in general. Bad emotions, on the other hand, lead us to selfishness, meanness, arrogance, intolerance, cruelty, stupidity, to death in life. The danger posed by the Tea Party, I suggest, is that it traffics too much in bad emotions. In this it is not unlike others among social conservatives and some libertarians. Leaders from the right have been using a certain emotional repertoire to mobilize Americans behind their political agenda of low taxes and small government. Divorce that political agenda from the emotions used to sell it and it stands naked, whimpering and shivering, not so attractive at all. Let me say, though, I admired the patriotism of the Tea Party and its desire to have America live by standards of just government and to be a constructive force for good in the world. And I like its populism -- elites always need to be challenged and kept on their best behavior. But at this point in our nation's history when the American dream is once again under stress and threat, I don't agree with the policies pushed by the Tea Party and its intransigence. To me, fundamentally, government is good. Fundamentally, paying taxes is the right and sensible thing to do. I say this as an avowed American patriot who reads the Federalist Papers and who volunteered for service in the Vietnam War -- which few of my generation did. The American dream rests on government. Without government there can be no security for life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. That's what the Declaration of Independence holds as a self-evident truth. Right-thinking people believe in government, for government provides justice. They may argue over what government should do to provide justice, but that is a different order of discussion. They do not belittle or disparage government in principle; nor do they denigrate those who serve in government with good will and to best of their abilities. Right-thinking people also believe in paying taxes. Government and other public goods make our lives more secure, more noble and more prosperous. There can be no free markets and capitalism without government providing for law and order and protecting title to property both real and personal. So these public goods must be paid for. Again, we can argue over how much to pay and who should pay what, but those are arguments on the details, not the principle. The principle is unassailable: Paying taxes is right and moral. For the many devout Christians in the Tea Party, this conclusion should be a no-brainer. The Apostle Paul said in Romans that the established authorities are of God (Romans 13:1), adding "for this cause pay ye tribute also" (Romans 13:6). Jesus himself accepted the legitimacy of rendering unto Caesar what which was Caesar's, with reference to taxes. He was against the moneychangers in the temple of the Lord but did not protest the tax collectors of his day. His kingdom was "not of this world." John Calvin, the theological great grandfather of our religious right, also affirmed in his magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion the need for good Christians to accept and obey government -- even bad government. It was up to God, Calvin wrote, to remedy tyranny in the first place; not up to us, though he warned princes and ministers of state to fear the wrath of God for abuses of their stewardship and public trusts. If the demands of the Tea Party for smaller government and low taxes have brought our republic to its knees, which I think they have, then the Tea Party has become a danger to us all even if its advocates won the straw poll in Iowa. A very dangerous dysfunction in Washington brought about a downgrade of our debt and panic to financial markets. It was not economics; our economics are not that bad. It was fear of our coming political collapse that caused Standard & Poor's to raise a red flag about the future of our country. If the Tea Party wants to help us save our country, then it should speak well for government and offer an olive branch to its opponents on practical issues of spending and taxation. It should side with the "better angels of our nature," as Lincoln did when the country was previously divided on the brink of civil war. Published: Fri, Aug 26, 2011