A Brit gets Beck and the Tea Party

Why doesn’t Britain have a Tea Party?:

The framers of the US Constitution were convinced that the principles which they made explicit in it and which underlay it were timeless truths about human nature, derived in their case from the writings of John Locke, and drawing on the older natural law tradition rooted in Christianity and the ancient Greeks. Central to these truths was a set of natural rights and liberties on which neither other individuals nor, more particularly, governments should trespass. Although the actual manner in which these rights and liberties were to be exemplified will be historically conditioned – and they could be exemplified in different ways – they, together with the consent of the governed, will form the basis of any legitimately constituted state. One thing which Jefferson in particular was conscious of was that a mere majority of voters was not enough to guarantee liberty: ‘173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one’. It wasn’t ‘elective despotism’, even if arrived at by impeccably democratic processes which the revolution had been fought for, but for the rights of man, safeguarded as far as possible through prudent constitutional and institutional structures. For the Founders, indeed, individual liberty was paramount, and democracy at best a means. Individual people had a right to themselves and their fates, and government was to be limited to allow for the full expression of this.

The Tea Party agrees with the Founders. The rights of man are timeless; the Constitution which safeguards and embodies them is not to be tampered with. The role of government is to protect liberty, even in the face of elective despotism. However, for most of the twentieth century and for all so far of the twenty –first, the Founders’ view has not been shared by most politicians or, in the main, by the Supreme Court. The mass of the American body politic and judiciary, in their actions at least, have decided that the Founders’ principles are not timeless at all, but simply yesterday’s solutions to yesterday’s problems. All human affairs are in flux and evolution; there are no timeless truths of morality, of politics or of anything else. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR, all believed in a strong regulatory role for the state, that, for all kinds of reasons, worthy and less worthy, the state has a right to interfere in the free actions and transactions of individuals. As the twentieth century went on the state’s purpose was extended to encompass the redistribution of wealth according to the notions of ‘fairness’ of particular politicians, and to develop the community according to other preferred policy nostrums, including changing and mutable ideas on welfare and education (and now health and sexual morality).

All this has been in the name of democracy and equality, and often in blatant conflict with the founding documents.
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One side-effect is that big players, whether capitalists or trade unions, now have an interest in capturing the bureaucracies and mechanisms of the state, which they spend huge amounts of money and effort in doing, while those bureaucracies themselves seek ever to aggrandize and expand their influence and domains.

What has come to be called progressivism in this context is the idea that the state and its institutions, Constitution and all, are or should be undergoing constant evolution – and this progressivism is common to both left and right in to-day’s mainstream politics. Glenn Beck sums it up thus: ‘Progressivism has less to do with the parties and more to do with individuals who seek to redefine, reshape, and rebuild America into a country where individual liberties and personal property mean nothing if they conflict with the plans and goals of the State’ – and we could, of course, add to what Beck says by pointing out that the goals of ‘the State’ are in fact the goals of those individuals and interest groups who have captured the state apparatus, including the largely self-serving bureaucracies spawned by all this legislation and planning. Against progressivism, Beck and his fellow Tea-Partiers want to remind the American public of the older, more venerable notion of the Constitution and of the timeless principles on which it rests.

Beck is, as I say, touching on a deep philosophical point, as to whether there are or are not timeless truths about human nature and human flourishing, and timeless moral principles. If there are, then, by that very fact the scope for state activity becomes constrained, and particularly if they take the form we find in Locke, which stresses individual rights and liberties (in which we surely all believe, at least deep down, and which is why most of us prefer democracy to tyranny, and don’t like being pushed around by officials and bureaucrats). In this, in the USA, the Tea Party may well make headway, given the robust sense of personal liberty which still obtains there (often for religious reasons), and particularly now, in the present state of political disillusion there, of which the rapid fall from popularity of the President is a striking symptom. The Tea Party, over the coming months and years, may well become a force which begins to wield influence within the Republican Party, and to which the Democrats will have to listen, at local level at least.
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So why is there is no sign of a British Tea Party?

It is true that in Britain there is nothing like the US Constitution around which campaigners against progressivism and the over-mighty state can gather. But this in itself would not mean that liberty and timeless moral principles are not held in high esteem in Britain. Indeed as recently as World War Two a robust sense of the individual and of the importance of his or her self-reliance was very much part of the British psyche. But so, unfortunately, was a degree of deference and servility. Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)? Maybe we have to remind ourselves that it was against precisely that side of the British character – servility masquerading as laziness, or vice versa – that the Tea Party of 1773 was reacting, while staking its future on the other side, with Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution and the rights of man…

Tea anyone?