THE PARTY FAITHFUL

"The broad movement of American politics in recent decades has been toward greater inequality, the discrediting of public institutions and a near idolatry of private markets at the expense of corporate accountability."
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, THE NATION, January 24, 2011

"If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident."
Eric Hoffer, THE TRUE BELIEVER

Economically, things are rough all over, excepting a tiny minority that waxes ever richer. Meanwhile some Americans, calling themselves Tea Party Patriots, are so sure of the righteousness of this inequality that they enthusiastically elected politicians who have pledged not only to uphold the situation, but to eliminate remaining social safeguards. While our capitalist economy is imploding, these people fear impending socialism. After many years of capitalism's gradually being released from constraints imposed after the last Great Depression, the predictable collapse has happened, and the only thing we have to fear, apparently, is another round of constraints upon private enterprise.
The Tea Partiers, their prodders in the media, and their secret exploiters among the extremely wealthy, feel no need for logic. Their loyalty, "near idolatry", to the economic system that brought on this current persistent recession is based on faith alone. Free enterprise is good, freer enterprise, better. Socialism in any form is evil. Economic inequality is right. The rich are entitled to their luxuries just as the poor are entitled to their privations.
To rational people, economic systems are tools, to be used by societies for the mundane purpose of delivering more and better goods and services to more people. As human beings progress, we learn from mistakes, so we can improve on existing systems. The social safety net, along with business and industrial regulations and public works projects, were enacted when it became clear that unbridled free enterprise morphs into a sophisticated piracy that causes misery on a scale traditional pirates can only dream about. Knowing this, a return to free-range capitalism would be insane. Yet to the Tea Party faithful, this is where we need to go...not because it is sensible, but because it is morally right.
Tycoons and entrepreneurs know that economics and morals do not make a good fit. Right is getting a product or service and selling it at a profit. Wrong is failing to do so, thus losing money. It's a primitive impulse. Our forebears could not look too closely at how mastodons might feel about being hunted. People needed food. Bring down a mastodon and many people get to eat. It was a collective operation, too. Faithful devotion to rugged individualism in mankind's early days would probably have nipped the human race in the bud. Human progress depends on doing what works.
Communism taught us the horrors of unhampered collectivization, which not only killed and enslaved millions, but failed miserably to ease poverty. Modern liberals are not looking around for a new Lenin. But common sense shows that some collective action by society can have positive effects, that it does not pave the road to Gulag. We know we can have sensible controls on free enterprise without stifling initiative. As citizens of a democracy we are naturally free to evaluate our government's effect on our economy, to make adjustments, to set goals. We're not stuck with anything.
As citizens of a democracy, we are free to argue over the effectiveness of any plan, any procedure, to discuss the price, to compromise, to revise. Human institutions being imperfect, reasonable people can always make improvements. The Tea Party faithful, however, insist on a narrow, subjective reading of the Constitution, by which the national government has no power but to protect business from government. Profit is sacred, it's every man for himself, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be fought for and preserved, apparently, at gunpoint. Planning and cooperation are sins. Has capitalism taken on a religious reverence because it no longer works?
In the current disaster, government bailed out the financial and automobile industries and invested in job creation. And though prosperity is not yet around the corner, these moves are understood to have averted a worse catastrophe. To the Tea Party faithful, the right thing would have been to let the disaster go as far as it would go. Bank failures, industrial bankruptcies, joblessness on an enormous scale--these would have been acceptable alternatives to socialism. At least we would all be free to get and keep whatever we can. No nirvana, no celestial virgins, no eternal planet, no streets of gold--the Tea Party paradise is an earthly one, where government has no hold on anybody. If this does not sound promising, it's what comes from confusing philosophy and religion with the unexciting process of economics.