What Do Tea Partisans Want?

              In the October 16-17 issue of Wall Street Journal was an article by Jonathon Haidt entitled, “What Tea Partiers Really Want.”  I felt the article was well done and reasonably fair-- which is quite unusual for a WSJ opinion piece.  Most of us feel that the Tea Party types are a motley collection of homophobes, gun nuts, fundamentalists, racists, and jingoists who have no clear idea what they believe in, but are very sure what they are against—everything and everybody.  The author does not deny this, in fact he is writing as a conservative, trying to warn other conservatives that whatever these people are, they aren’t really conservative Republicans.   And though Republicans may reap short term gains at the polls, the author is certain that to whatever extent they ever take over the Republican Party, they’ll wreck it.  

            Yet he claims that the Tea Partisans’ objection to what they see as “liberal policies” may have a coherent basis, at least, more coherent than the random behavior of unsupervised morons.    He says  that TP types believe in Karma--that there is some kind of cosmic law which ordains that people reap what they sow—that virtue ultimately prevails and that people make their own bad luck.  And they therefore feel that by taxing virtuous and hard-working winners to prop up a bunch of hopeless losers, liberals are not only being unfair to the virtuous, but contravening the laws of nature.  (And possibly even doing a disservice to the losers themselves, by shielding them from the hard lessons that might force them to abandon their shiftless ways and become successful.)

            Of course, whether you buy that people get what they deserve—that bad luck only falls to those who have somehow brought it on themselves—depends largely on where you’re coming from.  Mainly, it depends on whether you’ve actually had any bad luck.

            I grew up with my little brother, Ken, who was stricken at the age of eight months with a paralytic fever (possibly polio) which left him trapped for life in a body that could neither speak nor walk.  It’s difficult to see how an eight month old could do something to deserve this fate.   And this fate affected not only Ken, but the whole family, especially my mother, who was the hardest working and most devout Christian I ever met.  Don’t think that this particular kind of misfortune was all that uncommon. In the Mulberry Street neighborhood alone-- within 600 ft of my front door--three children, not counting my brother, contracted polio, and it destroyed the lives of every one of them. So the idea that people in desperate circumstances have always brought it on themselves has seemed me to be a particularly cruel hoax.  But I do suspect that Tea Party types actually believe it, and that this is one of their animating principles. 

            Yet I suspect that they have an additional reason for backing the political agenda of an economic class to which they do not belong:  they are Tory workers.   Forty years ago I had a friend who was completing his MSW in Iowa City. He had written a paper about the Tory worker phenomenon and he told me about it.   In a union organizing campaign, even when all workers agree that in their own particular industry, a union contract would double wages, some workers will oppose the union and back the company.  Do not confuse this with the situation where in a concentration camp some inmate will inform on the other prisoners for an extra crust of bread.  Here at least, the guy gets a crust of bread.   But the Tory worker gets nothing at all, except the chance to earn the eternal contempt of his fellow workers.  I have actually been in organizing efforts where some of my colleagues admitted that a union contract would double their wages, but still opposed it.  Were they hoping that by backing the company, they would enhance their job security?  No; they cheerfully admitted that it was a union contract that would give them security--the boss would give them only a pat on the back, and then dump them when it became convenient.  So what could they have been thinking?

            Fortunately, my friend explained it to me.  He said that these people are such pathetic losers that they have given up taking actions that will produce concrete improvements in their lives.  Instead, they have a rich fantasy life, in which they imagine themselves as managers, as wealthy entrepreneurs, or even as heirs enjoying vast inherited wealth.  So when asked to take a position on an issue which pits the servants against the masters, they back the masters, even though they are not members of that group.  Asking them to take position against their overlords requires them to them to choose between this fantasy life and their real world life—to reject the fantasy in exchange for a chance at a better reality—and they won’t do it.   The fantasy life is all they have left.

            Not everyone who opposes redistributive politics is a Tory worker.  In America, a small businessman who nets less than $40,000 a year might reasonably oppose expenditures for improving opportunities for those on the very bottom, even when the tax bite to implement this would surely fall on those at much higher incomes than his present level.  Why? Because if people on the bottom ever had much real opportunity, then they would be unlikely to accept the lousy minimum wage jobs he offers. 

            But people vote according to many things other than personal economic interest.  Sometimes when people get themselves far enough out of poverty that they would never qualify for any new social benefits,  yet have incomes still low enough that they would not be the ones paying most of the tax hit for any redistributive programs, one might think that such people would be neutral.  They would say, “Who cares? I have no dog in this fight.”  But this seldom happens.  Many of you are in this situation, and so am I.  Most people in this situation feel morally obligated to take one side or the other.  Either they help those who are much poorer than themselves take from those who are much richer—or help those who are richer keep what they have taken from those who are poorer.   (Warren Buffet sadly says, “Yes, there is a class war and my class is winning.”)  Those of us in the middle—you’d think we’d be neutral—but we never are.  We either back the poor against the rich—or back the rich against the poor.   I always back the poor, partly as a matter of ethics. If a rich man thinks that his country treats rich men badly, he can always give away his money and be poor immediately.  But the reverse option does not exist for the poor man.   Yet I suppose my willingness to make life more agreeable for those on the absolute bottom may also relate to a perceived self-interest.  Life, from what I’ve seen of it, is quite uncertain.  Each of us is just one accident, one lawsuit, or one serious illness away from poverty.  You’d have to be a pretty myopic optimist to think that you have no chance at all of becoming exponentially poorer, or that you have much more than a non-zero chance of becoming exponentially richer.