If you picture two baseball fans debating the merits of their teams, you can't imagine one of them calmly leaning over and saying--in as soothing a voice as possible--"Chuck, I know you're a Red Sox fan, and I respect that, but here's why I would like you to consider getting wildly excited about the Yankees."
People have tribal, gut-fed, almost hereditary attachments to the labels they wore growing up. There are life-long Catholics who can't vote pro-life if it means they'll have to check a box against a Democrat. There are 4th generation Republicans who won't defend the Constitution if a Republican happens to be desecrating it. The spirit of party is not the spirit of thinking people, and until we begin thinking beyond party, to what is right, what is true, what is fair, politics will remain a baseball game, with about the same level of rational discourse--pretty slogans, handsome candidates, empty minds, and obscene hecklers. I'm happy to report that the Tea Party movement seems to reflect every political and professional stripe: Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Academics, Civil Servants, and Entrepreneurs.
The common reality among Tea Party types is intellect. If you don't understand Adam Smith and the long, sorry historical record of failed command economies, the Tea Party movement will never excite you. At the Pasadena Tea Party, there was a band of Russian emigres who had personally tasted the fruits of Bolshevism. You see that contingent at a lot of tea parties--refugees from state economies who spent their childhood waiting in line for potatoes. They can't quite believe that America would entertain economic ideas that literally left them hungry as children, in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Block. If you don't understand that politicians promising loans to people who can't repay them, in return for votes, is what caused both the real estate bubble and the current recession, you will never get excited about the Tea Party movement. If you don't understand that there is nothing "free market" about bailing out global mega-corporations, just because they operate, nominally, in the private sector--you will never understand the tea party movement. If you don't understand the moral tradition behind protecting private property, and its real world economic benefits, you won't understand the tea party movement. You have to be a little smarter than Keith Olbermann, in other words, to comprehend basic economics.
Of course, no one wants to be called a socialist today. Politicians still get elected by promising tax cuts--even if they don't mean it. They still pretend they want to promote private sector jobs, but when you head into a recession, the very last thing you want to do is raise taxes or make spending promises that will plunge all of us into greater debt. That's something like putting a cast iron saddle on a race horse and expecting him to run faster.
If you don't understand that, you will never understand the tea party movement.
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