Sign of the Apocalypse: Dumbnicity

In two hundred years the Constitution hasn't been invoked as many times as it has during this election cycle. The Tea Party decries that it is under attack, that Barack Obama and his policies have hijacked the country from its founding principals and that, should we continue on this track, we are collectively doomed as a nation.

The Federalist Papers are considered documents critical to understanding the thought process that resulted in the Constitution, and so, to understand the Constitution and the intent of the Founding Fathers, it is essential to have read them. But the party that is invoking a return-to-American-roots this November appears to be exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned us against in his introduction to the essays.

"... the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. "

It's important to note that this quote could be hijacked by either party. After all, Barack Obama was elected on a tide of anti-Bush sentiment. What I believe is a considerate difference between the debates of the 2008 election and the 2010 election is a serious degradation in intellectual dialogue.

Both sides are equally culpable in pointing fingers and drawing up sound bytes, but one party has hijacked much of the national dialogue with invented words, talk of witchcraft and is undermining the national debate with ignorance. It is the Tea Party.

An article in today's New York Times lists out the crimes:

It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose guards handcuffed a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in Tea Party Land. Michele Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley.

Sharron Angle sank to new lows of obliviousness when she told a classroom of Hispanic kids in Las Vegas: “Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”

As Palin tweeted in July about her own special language adding examples from W. and Obama: “ ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

On Saturday, at a G.O.P. rally in Anaheim, Calif., Palin mockingly noted that you won’t find her invoking Mao or Saul Alinsky. She says she believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be — as Palin, O’Donnell and Angle keep saying — just like you.

While racism, Constitutional ignorance, and grammatical flubs may amuse us on tabloid stands and around the water cooler, it will be far less amusing in places like the Senate Arms Committee or around negotiating tables where highly capable people are discussing items like the impact of embargoes on a nuclear-armed rogue state like North Korea.

Sarah Palin has ushered in this crowd of Palinistas. They rally around a return to bare-bones Constitutionalism, but then announce gays shouldn't marry (a state issue), and that creationism should be taught in government-funded schools (see the First Amendment). This is not intellectual discourse. This is, as the New York Times article puts it, "making ignorance chic."

This is a shame on two fronts. One, it undermines our national dialogue by undermining the art of debate, the value of intelligence, and the need to build consensus. Second, the Tea Party has its roots in some very legitimate political concerns, but its platform has been undermined by those speaking from it. The Tea Party fundamentalists seceded from the Republican Party because they believed fiscal conservatism had been hijacked by conservative morals. It sought to keep the fiscal conservative platform while removing moral righteousness from it (Republicans: if you want tax cuts, you must also be pro-life and anti-gay; Tea Party: if you want tax cuts, good!) Somewhere, the Tea Party evolved into reactionary politics that is unapologetically Christian, notoriously unwilling to negotiate, and so anti-Washington that it's a mystery they want to get elected to serve there in the first place.

As a nation, we are at a delicate crossroads. We have a huge debt, but economics insists we not scale back government spending during a recession. We want to bring our troops home, but also want to ensure we don't leave a job half-finished. We must reduce our tax burden, but a generation of baby boomers have been promised social security and health care. These are problems without right or wrong answers. Remedies for them will not come by entrenching ourselves in our own viewpoints, but by rational thinking, compromise, and intelligent dialogue in Congress. Liberal or conservative, we must elect people capable of such a task. I have yet to see a Tea Party candidate who fits the bill.

This is not a new problem, though. Alexander Hamilton addresses it in the opening paragraph of the Federalist Papers:

... it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.