The New Yorker this month has an extensive article on the roots of the so-called "tea party" movement--a mix of right-wing, libertarian, populist and, yes, sometimes racist ideologies that has engaged the extreme right in politics this year, spawned a host of individual organizations (one called the "conservative society of America that goes by CSA, eerily reminiscent of the Confederate States of America). Sean Wilentz, Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party's Cold War Roots, The New Yorker 32-39 (Oct. 18, 2010). It's worth outlining the picture he paints of the Tea Party ideological roots, since if candidates supported by tea party groups win big in this election, that philosophy will dominate what happens in the next few years. It is not a pretty picture.
Wilentz outlines Glenn Beck's radical anti-progressive screeds, with his fight against separation of church and state, opposition to anything done by the federal government, and "highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism and the division of powers. Beck urges a negative view of the nation, claiming that we are in a decline that started with the Progressives under Woodrow Wilson, when the Federal Reserve System was created and a federal income tax insituted. Not surprisingly, this anti-Wilson, anti-Fed, anti-progressivism, anti-tax negativism gets multiplied innumerable times on the web, in commentary on the Washington Post articles, blog posts (my own included), and anywhere that people try to engage in a genuine discussion about the issues.
Wilentz traces Beck's warped views about American History to radical right-wingers in the early 20th century that sane Americans treated as the wacky fringe they were--W. Cleon Skousen and Robert Welch, the founder of the extremist right-wing John Birch Society. Wilenntz notes that "[t]he pressing historical quedstion is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew--and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them."
The Birch Society was founded in 1958 and exploited fears incited by Joe McCarthy of a "domestic conspiracy" under Communism. Birchers considered Eisenhower and Kennedy communists. He couldn't understand the difference between a liberal philosophy and totalitarianism (quite a conflation, that). He claimed that Progressives and Woodrow Wilson moved the nation towards totalitarianism, and coinsidered the IRS and the Rockefellers as part of an international conspiracy. The Birchers were organized (like the communist cells Welch so despised) in small groups to work in secret, "agitate the populace and elect right-thinking candidates." Bircher policies were dictated by Welch.
Skousen "was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixteies that even J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. watched him closely." Apparently, Hoover concluded that he had affiliated with extreme right-wing "professional communists" who ware promoting their own anti-communism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen taught speech at Brigham Young. He wrote two primers--The Naked Communist, making outlandist claims about FDR and the Russians, and The Naked Capitalist, suggesting that the Ivy League, with the Federal Reserve, Council of Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation, was "the world's secret power structure" formed through a conspiracy including Wilson adviser Colonel House, who helped establish the Fed and supported the graduated income tax. He founded his own ultra-right society--the Freeman Institute, later renamed the National Center for Constitutional Studies--which targeted as evil most things federal ( including OSHA, EPA, FCC, elimination of the gold standard, agricultural subsidies, federal aid to education, federal social welfare systems, social security, elimination of prayer in public schools) and the United Nations. Skousen was "a pariah among most conservative activists," and was thrown out of one group for having "gone off the deep end" and another group thought he was "perilously close to Nazism." And he wrote, in "The 5,000 Year Leap" that the Constitution was rooted in the Bible, not the Englightenment, and that framers believed in minimal central government. Both of those ideas are inaccurate: the Constitution is rooted in the Enlightenment and against state-established religion, and the framers--especially Alexander Hamilton--were in fact meeting to get rid of the problematical decentralized union formed under the Articles of Confederation by creating a strong federal system. And as Wilentz notes, Thomas Jefferson "wrote approvingly in 1811 of having federal taxes... fall solely on the wealthy, which meant that 'the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of hiscountry made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." Skousen even claimed the Founders had chosen "IN God We Trust" as the US motto, even though it was only in 1966 (during the cold war, that it was mandated on all currency and 1956 when it was approved as the national motto.
Wilentz notes that Beck has had John Birch Society spokesman Sam Antonio on his show and the Society runs Beck's clips. Beck has praised Ezra Taft Benson, the Skousen associate and thirteenth Mormon president who praised the Birchers as "the most effective non-church organization in our fight against creeping socialism and Godless Communism" and denounced all Democrats and intellectuals as socialists and communist sympathizers in 1966. He promotes Skousen's three books as good history; 250,000 people bought The 5000 Year Leap in the first half of 2009. Tea Party groups gather to study the book, and Beck continues Skousen's attack on the Fed, the Council on Foreign Relations and Woodrow Wilson. Beck also quotes other radicals such as Eustace Mullins, who wrote an "anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world." And the attack on Roosevelt and Wilson as Bosheviks is simply loony--Roosevelt wanted government to support capitalism through regulation of big business a la Alexander Hamilton, and Wilson sent troops to Russia to fight the Bolshevik White Army and broke up monopolies to help small companies compete.
Glenn Beck, fringe-nut that he is, isn't the Tea Party. But he is illustrative of the kinds of ideas that dominate Tea Party activism, as in the Angle attack on Reid in Nevada and her appeal to a right-wing view of "mainstream America." The problem, Wilentz concludes, is that there are no strong intellectual, anti-Bircher/anti-Tea Party conservatives today like William Buckley in the 1960s and 1970s. Much as progressives may dislike Reagan and Nixon, they were at least, Wilentz implies, a "conservative revolution that succeeded by keeping extremist elements far from the centers of power" while "undoing the fiscal underpinnings of New Deal-style government and redirecting U.S. foreign policy."The problem now, according to Wilentz, is that there is no national figure equal to Reagan, and that has "allwed the current resurgence of extremism." The right is left with media stars "who make their money by stirring fears and resentments", resulting in "a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism" (quoting David Klinghoffer). As Wilentz says, this is "an alarming state of affairs" for those of us who believe in a progressive nation.
One clear facet of the Tea Party ideology is anti-tax. Whatever else unites the teapartiers, they dislike taxation in general and the federal income tax with progressive rates in particular. It isn't always clear that they know much about how taxes work, but that doesn't seem to interfere with the anti-tax venom. Is there a way to address this--if not for the tea partiers, at least for those who may be influenced by what they have heard of the anti-tax venom? Richard LaVoie at Akron University law school has an idea for rejuvenating our historical view that it is patriotic to pay taxes. See LaVoie, Tea Parties and Taxes: What's Patriotism Got to Do with It? (available on SSRN).
LaVoie notes that when Biden said that taxes were a part of patriotism in the 2008 election campaign, Palin claimed that nobody in her America thought taxes were associated with patriotism because they "kill jobs" and McCain responded that was "just plain dumb!" LaVoie looks at some of the research on tax evasion and the various factors that play into tax compliance. He concludes that it is important to mitigate the potential negative impact of the Tea Party movement on tax compliance, and suggests that we need to separate patriotism from anti-tax sentiments, with which it has become associated due to the "no taxation without representation" Boston Tea Party and the positive attitudes towards of tax avoidance, as long as it isn't illegal tax evasion, that developed in the early twentieth century (captured by Learned Hand's famous quote). The duty to pay taxes, that is, became a "purely legal" and not a moral or patriotic duty. The Tea Party, spurred by the massive government bailout of the financial system and the economic stimulus, seems to have a unifying "bedrock principle" supporting less spending and lower taxes. Id. at 35. The group seems to believe that Americans are overtaxed.
By promoting the dogma that Americans are overtaxed and have a right to rebel against taxes, including by not paying ones they disagree with, or that were enacted to support programs they disagree with, then the public faith in the fairness of the tax system and in the existence of wide-spread compliance is jeopardized. Id. at 37
In order to break the "popular linkage of patriotism with anti-tax sentiment", he suggests that there might be two ways to give Tea Party types some sense of achieving their goals, while recognizing that neither spending nor taxes will be cut sufficiently to satisfy them. First, he proposes some form of earmark. Taxpayers might be allowed a binding earmark for all their taxes, so that they do not support government programs of which they do not approve. Id. at 43. But he acknowledges that earmarking carries with it many problems, so suggests that only a portion of a taxpayer's tax liability be permitted to be earmarked, along the lines of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund earmark. This would give the government full ability to use revenues as needed, while giving the taxpayer a sense of some control over his tax dollars (albeit an illusory one). Alternatively, he suggests a completely nonbinding earmark, that would serve to focus taxpayers on the functions of government and the reasons for taxation to support the nation's priorities, without posing problems for democracy and workability that a real earmark would pose. Id. at 48 Second, he proposes a voluntary "tax" (which, since voluntary, would not actually be a tax) similar to existing state checkoff funds. It would be called the "patriotic remittance tax" and could be earmarked for specific program support. LaVoice believes it could inspire the connection between patriotism and paying taxes to the federal government. Id. at 50-53.
I'm not sure whether LaVoie's idea of a voluntary patriotic remittance would work, but it certainly couldn't hurt to try it. I do know that the Tea Party rhetoric (and the Glenn Beck overlay of distortions and fearmongering) are damaging to patriotism and to the well-being of the nation and its peoples. We need to get beyond the knee-jerk anti-tax sentiments and consider how best to address the many problems we face of decaying infrastructure, collapsing manufacturing base, growing inequality that leaves the vast majority of Americans with a declining standard of living while the few at the top rake in all the rewards.
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