Politics in America: The Tea Parties & The Religious Right (Haddigan)

Lee Haddigan writes his first analysis for EA:

As the Tea Party phenomenon continues to gather pace, commentators still struggle to explain the appeal of this latest grassroots conservative movement.

The Tea Party is not a national political “party” with a stated platform of policies and principles. It is a protest campaign composed of thousands of local and state-wide groups, each concerned with how the actions of the Federal Government affect them in their community, and each expressing their resentment of the liberal Washington ‘elite’ through local action. There are efforts to coordinate these groups in a national crusade by organizations such as the Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots, who use events like National Tax Day to show the mass support the Tea Party message receives, but they are secondary to the main objective of securing change in Washington through influence upon state elections.

What the different groups share, however, is a belief in certain traditional conservative values that need to be defended against the aggrandisement of Washington, which dates back to (and here you take your pick): President Obama’s healthcare and spending plans, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the 16th Amendment of 1913 that established the federal income tax, or the 14th Amendment (ratified 1868) that sanctioned the expansion of federal government into areas formerly reserved exclusively to individual states by the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights.


Central to these Tea Party convictions are the need for a return to an original interpretation of the Constitution, and the desire to see taxes cut. These are backed, for many TPers, by their faith in the argument that America is a nation founded by God on eternal Divine principles, and whose resulting “exceptionalism” is threatened by a secular elite hellbent on destroying the spiritual foundations of the United States of America.
So the Tea Party movement is the latest manifestation of conservative discontent with progressive liberal programmes, one that differs little in priorities and aims from similar protest movements that have gone before. But that does not explain why, generation after generation, millions of Americans feel so passionately about these recurring issues to spend their time, money, and endeavour in attempting to reform a political structure that has proved so obdurate to change.

Here is one way into the phenomenon. The religious right do not like taxes. This is not an expression of economic resentment, as many assume, but a deeply felt moral objection, derived from the word of God, to the principle of taxation. The argument goes like this:
Mankind was created with the individual free-will to choose to follow, or not, the moral laws of God. People cannot be forced to act morally by any authority. Jesus did not compel the rich young ruler to give up his wealth. He gave him the choice, as He did all of us, to act charitably.

When the government usurps that function, e.g. taxation to pay for health care, then it breaks the First, and Great, Commandment that “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. Government, instead of God, becomes the keeper of mankind’s conscience, and destroys the covenant between the individual and His Maker that salvation is achieved by voluntarily accepting the lessons contained in Scripture.

This desire to be allowed to pursue a personal relationship with God untrammelled by government interference underlies also the Tea Party’s calls for a limited Constitution and free markets. Their reverence for the intent of the Founding Fathers lies in the belief that they instituted a form of government that was based upon the word of God.
Not all of the TPers, of course, are believers in the religious roots of individual and political liberty. But the respect for God-given individual freedom imbues the movement, and gives it a moral impetus that those who dismiss it as merely a manifestation of disgruntled and myopic taxpayers would do well to understand. The question is whether the TP can harness that that religious impulse and turn it into a sustainable challenge to the hegemony of the Washington elite.

As a historian of conservative movements that have failed in the past, after exhibiting a similar burst of initial enthusiasm, I admit to a certain pessimism. But, as Frank Chodorov, the most influential individualist thinker of the 1940s and 1950s once remarked, at the seeming impossibility of conservatives taking back America from the New Deal liberal leviathan, “It’s fun to fight.”