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More Effective Government Would Neutralize Tea Party

What do historians make of the Tea Party movement?  Certainly, popular outrage at political and economic elites is nothing new.  The Tea Party shares common elements with the populist outbursts of the 1890s and the 1930s—a conviction economic interests corrupt politics, a nostalgia for a “lost” America, a tendency to espouse conspiratorial explanations, a loony racist fringe.

But these similarities are skin-deep.  Earlier variants of populism ultimately believed in the duty and capacity of government to act on behalf of ordinary Americans.  Modern populism—of which the Tea Party is our best recent example—has been hijacked by the right and defined largely by resentment of government.

These anxieties, as historian Sean Wilentz traces in his recent New Yorker piece, mark a reprise of the paranoid anti-communism of the 1950s.  Like members of the John Birch Society then, today’s Tea Partiers have a tendency to see Karl Marx lurking behind even the most prosaic government action—fluoridation of water, the Federal Reserve’s discount rate, a timid gesture at health reform.

And these anxieties, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich and others have argued, mark a last gasp of the backlash against the 1960s social movements.  Tea Partiers are whiter, richer, and more male than the population as a whole.  When they rail about “taking our country back,” it is pretty clear—given the vitriol aimed Obama and Pelosi—whom they blame for taking it from them in the first place.

This is not to say that we should dismiss these anxieties.  The economy is in the tank.  Real wages have stagnated for a generation.  Securities we once relied upon—income stability, home equity, job-based health care and pensions—have all but evaporated.  But the Tea Party, and its opportunistic adoption by Republicans, would only make things worse.

What about the Tea Party’s own historical claims?  Its fetish for the founding fathers is predictable, but unimportant.  There is not a political movement in American history that hasn’t staked this ground.  The problem, as Jill Lepore underscores in her new book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, is that the nation’s founding debate “contains an ocean of ideas.  You can fish almost anything out of it.”  How else to explain the simultaneous Jeffersonian pretensions of the Union and the Confederacy, the labor movement and its opponents, civil rights activists, and die-hard segregationists?

More interesting, to my mind, is the Tea Party’s anti-statist fervor.  But is there any substance to the claim that big government has run amok—trampling ever more on personal liberties and reaching ever deeper into the wallets of ordinary Americans?

For starters, this is a peculiar moment in modern American history to raise the “taxed enough already” standard.  The highest marginal income tax rate (35 percent) has not been this low since 1931, and it is down sharply from its Cold War peak of nearly 91 percent.  The median tax rate for a family of four, currently about 6 percent, is at a historical low.  Business tax rates are also at their lowest level in the modern era.

The real complaint, I think, is how little we get in return.  The problem, in other words, is not that the state is too big but that it is that it is not big enough to make a difference in people’s lives.  Americans generally applaud the public programs that are dear to them—all the more so if the way in which they are paid for creates a sense of entitlement (how else do we make sense of the “Keep Your Hands off My Medicare” signs that littered the health-care debate?).

The general resentment is directed not at the idea of affirmative government action, but at its execution—haphazard social programs, episodic bailouts, the vast human and fiscal expense of our recent and current wars.  If our taxes instead underwrote—in real and visible ways—economic security and opportunity for ordinary Americans, the Tea Party would be over pretty quickly.

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