THE CUMBERLAND GAP

How can we follow the reasoning of all these old white folks who claim the solution to all their problems will come from making their elected government go away? These people came of age in a time when government was more active than at any period in American history. At the same time they have enjoyed more economic stability and success than anyone, ever. Yet they hate their government and vote for people avowed to destroy it. They hang teabags from their hats and threaten violence if elections do not go their way. They threaten secession, and plan to repeal Constitutional provisions guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans. What has made them so upset with a world where they have come out quite well? What would they replace it with?
These old white Americans claim to want their country back, yet are unable to explain where it might have gone. So distraught are they that they would see their own comfortable lifestyles destroyed, believing perhaps that they achieved their success without any help from anybody, and they can certainly do it again. Many others will be on the brink of destitution, but these comfortable Americans in latter years will be just fine. Their goals are not conservative. Conservatism seeks the preservation of the status quo, which is just what these old white people intend to destroy.
As to what will replace the status quo, they vaguely hint at a distant and golden past. After all, they want their country "back." These well-off citizens of the dominant ethnic culture hail a time before government tyranny and taxes restricted the right of everyman to seek and find his full potential. In our history, there has never been a time when such a utopia actually existed. in our own time, to do away with government would be disastrous for us all, starting with the old and fairly prosperous, whose paper assets would be stolen by the ultra-rich, and whose personal possessions would be brutally taken by younger, crueler neighbours.
The romantic vision of a future utopia based on a halcyon past persists, however. The only time we ever came close to complete freedom from society was right after our Revolution, on the Appalachian frontier. British authority had been rejected, American authority had not yet been fully established, and beyond a thick tall veil of seemingly endless forest, a continent loomed, full of resources. Load your wagon and your long rifle, and leave your problems and past behind. No need for social security, health insurance, or unemployment compensation when there is always work to do, killing Indians and felling trees, finding everything you need right there in the wilderness. No government agents to tell a man he cannot trap or hunt, or hold slaves or shoot strangers...it was paradise on a permanent camping trip.
Of course, for these aging, comfortable Americans to imagine themselves tough enough to make it in such a world indicates a large disconnect from reality. Nor can we forget that even in that woodsy beginning of our manifest destiny, the urge to form societies and government was irresistible. That elusive true freedom was always just that.
In reality, freedom has a chance to flourish only when people guarantee it for one another, and it has little, if anything to do with tax policy or social programs, when such things are openly discussed and fairly administered. But for some reason our tea party patriots feel strongly that America needs no social contract whatever, that all taxes are theft, all government despotic. The Cumberland Gap, in its days of discovery, leading us down through the forest into the boundless West, seems to be the ideal that tea baggers hunger for. If not, it would be helpful if they would come forth with a terse description of what they want. Then the rest of us could decide for ourselves whether the idea makes any sense.