Collective Conscious

Chait:

Here’s more evi­dence that Tea Party Repub­li­cans are no more likely than other Repub­li­cans to fret about the Patriot Act — i.e., not likely at all:

Much of the reac­tion to Tuesday’s vote not to fast-​​track some pro­vi­sions of the Patriot Act has painted it as a vic­tory for the Tea Party (e.g., here, here, here, andhere). Tea Partiers, the story goes, were cen­tral to a group of Repub­li­cans bolt­ing their party and pre­vent­ing the mea­sure from passing.

The prob­lem is that the num­bers don’t sug­gest the Tea Party had any­thing to do with it.

Pin­ning down the role of the Tea Party can be tricky, because the exact mem­ber­ship of the new “Tea Party Cau­cus” in the 112^th Con­gress is not yet known, although we do know the mem­ber­ship in the 111^th. Michelle Bachmann’s office says the new list will be released Feb. 17. But we can look at who was endorsed by a Tea Party orga­ni­za­tion or iden­ti­fied as a Tea Party can­di­date by a major news out­let in the 2010 midterms. And those mem­bers were not really less likely to sup­port the Repub­li­can lead­er­ship on this vote than mem­bers who were not:

The Tea Party is many things, but a gen­er­al­ized and prin­ci­pled oppo­si­tion to gov­ern­ment power is not one of them. Pri­mar­ily, the move­ment is an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of recent trends within the Repub­li­can Party.

If we look at the liberal-​​conservative divide today as it relates to the role of the state, we see clearly two key fac­tions: welfare-​​statists (lib­er­als) and security-​​statists (con­ser­v­a­tives).  The Tea Party is noth­ing more than an explicit vision of gov­ern­ment with all ves­tiges of the wel­fare state stripped away. To Tea Partiers, the social con­tract is noth­ing more than a legit­i­mate monop­oly on vio­lence. By that logic, the only civil right the gov­ern­ment is even enti­tled to grant is the right to share in that monop­oly (ie, the 2^nd Amendment).