The war on the Irenes of America

On what accounting does a 67 year-old grandmother in Kansas called Irene, perched on some town square with an Uncle Sam top hat and miniature American flags duct-taped to her Dollar General lawn chair, become "anti-American", a "terrorist", a "suicide bomber", a "hostage-taker", a "hijacker", an "extremist", "dangerous", a "threat", and a "Salafist/Wahabbist/Hezbollah-ist/Taliban"? On the accounting of your garden-variety leftist commentator and elected Democrat, if the magic-markered posterboard that Irene is holding reads some variation of "Stop the Spending!"

I'm no head-shrinker, but over the years I have given this sort of thing a deal of thought and so I will try my hand at diagnosing the leftist impulse for war against the Irenes of America, following the lead of MSNBC, which brought in a psychologist and psychotherapist to diagnose the psychological disruptions that MSNBC imagines must explain this "dangerous" phenomenon of Tea Party insistence on cutting spending.

Now, the first point to be made is that there is nothing remotely extreme or disturbed about concern for goverment spending when in four years under President Obama, America will have added $7 trillion to its national debt, after taking two and a quarter centuries and 43 presidencies to add the other $10 trillion. That MSNBC head-shrinker -- besides finding parallels between the Tea Partiers and the Norwegian shooter/bomber who killed a hundred innocents -- diagnosed the Tea Partiers as "delusional. But my best assessment is that the delusion in this is to be found much more in the notion that we can go most of the way to doubling the national debt in just four years, and carry on spending still more indefinitely.

The second point to be gotten out of the way is that these elites and leftists (if there's a distinction anymore) who have discovered "terrorism" and "anti-Americanism" in the decent, law-abiding, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-nation folk of America, are the same elites and leftists who have no interest whatever in fighting the actual enemies of America who actively want us all dead and burning in hell. The Left and the elite who damn decent folks within their own borders as "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party" have nothing but sympathies and excuses and apologies for the actual Hezbollah and like Islamic terrorists and fascists and eliminationists, and the greatest shock in all this is seeing them use "Hezbollah" as an epithet. But that's as may be. Onto the amateur head-shrinking.

The easy diagnosis is desperation, and that makes a fine start. Then there's the less psychiatric easy explanation: the dearth of intellectual rigor and the reliance on cribbing the arguments and even the verbatim coinages of other, more original commentators and politicos. So some highly overrated New York Times columnist types up some line about the Tea Party being "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party", and the next thing you know it's being aped by every leftist hack who thought "Bushitler" was clever circa 2003.

Also, the old-line press corrodes the Left and enables their extreme and extraordinary public pronouncements. The press subjects Republicans and conservatives to the most merciless scrutiny and skepticism, while any Democrat and leftist in America can be assured they will never be called out in the mainstream for contradicting themselves or fudging and fabricating their figures or making outlandish claims about their enemies. They do it because they know they'll get away with it, and over time they lose sense even of where the line is drawn.

And because politics is religion to the Left, there can be no vice in advancing the leftist cause. To be a leftist and an elite in the 21st Century is to be post-Christian, and when it is politics that takes the place of religion, the descent into ends-justify-means-ism must surely follow. Say and do whatever can be gotten away with, if it is necessary for the cause. So if it is necessary for the leftist cause that the Tea Party be repudiated and ruined, and if that means biscuit-baking grandmothers must be demonized by the nation's leaders as America-hating terrorists, well, the ends justify the means.

But why accuse the Tea Partiers of "anti-Americanism" of all things? When the Left and the elite aren't busy accusing the Tea Partiers of trying to blow up the country, they're scorning them for their earnest, childlike, rah-rah-sis-boom-bah patriotism. The America-haters claim may be explicable in some part by the conservative theory of leftist "projection", i.e., much of what leftists accuse their enemies of is in fact what's in their own hearts. So the Left reflexively accuses conservatives of, say, staging phony, "astro-turf" protests, because that's just the sort of thing they get up to, with their "Rules for Radicals" seminars and their college courses on activism and their paid labor-union rent-a-mobs bussed in from out of state. And if the Left is motivated by contempt for America then that's just the motivation that they'll project onto their opposition. Projection may explain some part of the leftist accusations of anti-Americanism in the flag-waving, flag-wearing Tea Partiers of all people, but I'd guess there's something more semantic at play.

The American conservative's patriotism is for the nation and not the government; the leftist's equivalent to patriotism is more or less the contrary. The conservative trusts that a nation of individuals pursuing what's best for themselves and their loved ones can only be the happier, richer, and freer nation; the leftist starts with a disdain for the average man and distrusts him to make the "right choices" for himself if left to his own devices, and sees the state as the font of all things good, the rightful distributor of wealth, the patron of the approved and scourge of the unapproved, and as the teacher of the nation, correcting its unenlightened history and base nature.

Well, if you're the sort of person who imagines that the good in the country is reposed in its government, then you're liable to regard the Tea Party and its rearguard action to roll back the cost and reach of government as a dagger at the heart of all that's right and good. Only, the very most foundational principle of the United States is freedom from government, of restricting and restraining the state. Which is why a lot of statists damning limited-government Tea Partiers as "anti-American" is the world turned upside down.