Tea Party is expression of 'general will' of the people

It’s not politics that drives the Tea Party movement; it’s patriotism — and not just flag-waving patriotism, but the underlying stream of the American consciousness that fueled our revolution and built our country.

Unless and until the mainstream media gets that message, there is not much hope for reporting that doesn’t try to smear, twist or trash the Tea Party.

For now though, most reporters assume that the Tea Party is a Republican invention, and thus worthy of the disdain typically shown by the left-leaning press for Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and numerous other Republicans.

Indeed, the only Republicans who seem to escape the smear treatment are the ones who sound like Democrats. Thus, there was the brief flirtation between the media and John McCain in 2000, and the near-beatification of David Brooks, the ersatz conservative columnist who scribbles for the New York Times, and has proven himself to be a truly “independent” conservative by constantly attacking conservative ideals. Call it the “adoration of the magpie.”

But the Tea Party is not Republican, it is conservative — which is why neither McCain nor Brooks qualify for admission short of a “Road to Damascus” conversion. And it is not just conservative in the sense of believing in conservative issues such as fiscal responsibility or traditional marriage, but rather in the fundamental sense of “conserving” that which our Founding Fathers built.

To get it right, you would actually have to say that the Tea Party is made up of conservators, rather than conservatives, which is why the Tea Party movement fundamentally rejects the effort to shoehorn it into the Republican Party. Republicans are as guilty as anyone of spitting on the Constitution, and when they do, heaven help them.

It’s true that the Tea Party doesn’t like big-spending, Marxist-oriented liberal Democrats like Barack Obama (surprise!) but it also doesn’t like hypocritical, pandering Republicans who see their job as compromising their espoused principles for the sake of helping Democrats advance their social agenda in the name of “bipartisanship.”

In fact, some of the Tea Party’s greatest rancor is reserved for two-faced Republicans — witness the spanking of Pennsylvania’s Sen. Arlen Spector, Utah’s Sen. Bob Bennett, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, and most recently Delaware’s longtime congressman Mike Castle, who got whacked by part-time witch and full-time Tea Party loyalist Christine O’Donnell in the GOP primary for an open U.S. Senate seat.

Most of these losing Republicans, or erstwhile Republicans, owe their defeats to the Tea Party movement. Most of them earned that animus due to their slavish devotion to big government, their disrespect for their constituents, and their susceptibility to the swooning effects of Potomac Fever — an illness peculiar to politicians whose main symptom is an uncontrollable desire to spend other people’s money in an earnest effort to secure re-election.

Such Republicans are of no use to the country. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who are willing to trade their constitutents’ trust for a little political security deserve neither. Or as American folk wisdom would have it — “Vote the bums out!”

That sentiment explains why pundits and the establishment press have been shocked by one election result after another this year. The victors had exactly one thing in common — no matter how bad they were as candidates, no matter how flawed they were as individuals, they were expressing the communal outrage of “we the people” at the disastrous arrogance of those we had elected to represent us.

Nor should it be considered an accident that the best-known victims of Tea Party anger are senators or candidates for the U.S. Senate. One thing that has become clear in the past several decades is that senators no longer reliably represent the people of their state, but rather their own self-interest.

This phenomenon is one of the unintended consequences of the 17th Amendment — which shifted the election of senators from the individual state legislatures to the people of each state. This was supposed to be a good idea because it gave “power to the people.” It was thus an easy sell. But it tampered with a crucial component of the architecture of the American republic that was devised by the genius of our Founding Fathers to withstand the rigors of time, temperament and outright treason.

The initial structure of the Congress brilliantly divided power between the mercuric mass of “the people,” who would elect their own representatives from among themselves to go to the House, and the sluggish, resistant “establishment,” which would choose a guardian of the individual state’s abiding interests to send to the Senate. This ensured a fundamental check on the growth of federal power by guaranteeing the separate states a voice through their senators. If a senator strayed from representing the interests of the state from whence he came, he would be replaced at the end of his term by the overseeing legislature.

With popular election of senators, however, came the inevitable shift of power away from the states to the individual senator and ultimately to their political parties. Rather than representing a state’s interests, a senator’s only concern from this point forward was representing himself TO the people as their friend and guardian — no matter who he was really beholden to.

So, it is indisputable that the 17th Amendment, which was supposed to give power TO the people, ironically took it away instead. It also moved power away from the individual states to the gargantuan federal monster.

The effect of the 17th Amendment in shifting the balance of power was not immediately apparent, however, because during the first part of the 20th century, America remained true to its foundational roots. As DeTocqueville noted in 1835, the American democracy could not exist without a moral people. The governor of our behavior throughout the 19th century was not our government, but our morality.

By the time of the early 20th century, that was starting to change. Government, especially the federal government, was growing, and morality was on the decline. The social contract between the people and their government was shredded. More and more, our elected officials were our “rulers,” not our “representatives.” And because morality no longer was recognized as a universal absolute truth, but rather as a relativistic matter of convenience, our rulers could talk themselves into doing literally anything for the so-called good of the people.

No doubt when the 17th amendment was ratified in 1913, most Americans congratulated themselves on putting their trust in “the people,” but really they had put their trust in the good will of politicians. For a while — when patriotism and morality were still held in high regard — it looked like it might even work. Popularly elected senators still strove to represent the sovereign citizens of their states; they did so out of a sense of loyalty, decency and dignity. By the end of the 20th century, however, most citizens would have come to doubt that such qualities still existed in their elected representatives, especially in their senators — and senators seemed to doubt that their loyalty should be placed in anyone other than the political party that told them how to vote.

Thus, we witnessed the decline of politics from the art of statesmanship to the craft of gamesmanship. This change solidified when the people lost confidence in their government, and the government lost touch with the people. Although not often voiced explicitly, a tacit realization of this change is what finally inspired the Tea Party movement.

As Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the inspirations of the American Revolution, wrote in “The Social Contract” in 1762:

“Finally, when the State, on the eve of ruin, maintains only a vain, illusory and formal existence, when in every heart the social bond is broken, and the meanest interest brazenly lays hold of the sacred name of ‘public good,’ the general will becomes mute: all men, guided by secret motives, no more give their views as citizens than if the State had never been; and iniquitous decrees directed solely to private interest get passed under the name of laws.”

A better description of the state of current American politics has never been written. Whether the country can be saved from ruin at this late juncture is not yet known, but the Tea Party movement is proof that the the “general will” is no longer mute. And this party is just getting started.