Teatopia

I read an interesting article written by Elias Isquith in Salon entitled “Tea Party’s embarrassing irony: How it’s ideal nation rejects basic American Beliefs”, much of which is commentary on a piece written by Reihan Salam, a conservative pundit who in his article coins the term “Teatopia”. What he describes is essentially a childish pipedream of a Federalist America where power is shifted from the federal government to state governments. States would put in place structures that are requested by their populace and corporate lobbyists would now look to the states instead of a central government to bestow favors upon them. The beauty of this system, from a conservative standpoint, is that states would evolve populated by people sharing values and ideas of how their children should be brought up and taught. If you live in a state whose policies do not align with your values, you can just move to another state. In time, California and Vermont can become even more liberal and the Carolinas more conservative. One could offer public pre-K and K-12 or even publicly funded college education, whereas another could provide vouchers for charter, internet or religious schools. Politics would be a friendly affair because everyone in the states avows the same ideologies. The role of the federal government becoming minimal, federal taxes would shrink and state taxes rise. In such a world we would become “50 mini states where everyone agrees”. The issue Mr. Isquith has with this (Reihan Salam does not propose this structure but just describes it as the Tea Party dream) is that it is anathema to the notion of democracy. “Democracy, it should go without saying, is not a system designed to tackle the problem of what to do when everyone is on the same page. You don’t need to venerate and inculcate the principles of compromise, pluralism and cooperation in a land where nobody questions what to do or how to do it.” Unfortunately the dream described by Salam, though maybe unattainable and impractical, is real. A segment of the population has convinced themselves (or been convinced) that it must be “their way or the highway”. Sharon Engels, when she ran for the Senate said that if we can’t get what we want at the ballot box, we will have to resort to 2nd amendment remedies. Another Tea Party Republican lamented that “the reason we are where we are is because we did not hold to our principles and were willing to compromise”. There is no sense of needing to live within a community of people with varied priorities , values and cultures and figuring out how to accommodate as many of the diverse interests as possible. That, after all is successful governance. Not bunching people with common interests together and providing only for a segment of the community aligned with you. I would like to expand on this a bit. Setting the issue of democracy aside, to make progress and to improve anything, there need to be countervailing forces at play. To invent the lever there needed to be a desire to move a rock and an inability to move it adequately. Here the two forces are the desire and the inability. Lacking one or the other, there is no lever. In our political system, there has been a pull from the left and one from the right. One wanting change, the other to stand still. These countervailing forces acting together, allows us to progress yet within cautious restraints. Our system works. The Soviet Union lacked any opposition and thus collapsed as in time also do all other dictatorships. Today much is written about the advantages of divergent points of view developed through varied experience, education or discipline, in solving problems, developing systems and creating new stuff. This variety could reside in an individual who has been exposed to varied cultures, socioeconomic conditions and a range of occupations. Or it can exist in a team made up of individuals, each with their differences along these lines from other members. Even if not for the issue of democracy as described by the author, I would expect that a Teatopia, made up of pockets of like thinking people, would stagnate at best, or wither and die or more likely be taken over by a foreign power. Fortunately neither of the authors expects Teatopia to go beyond the stage of a pipedream, however real it is, and I agree. We survived the pull from the Left in the 60s and will survive the pull from the right in the early part of the twenty first century and be stronger for having felt these pressures.