The Tea Party Manifesto: Why The Tea Party Has It All Wrong.

I recently received in an email a document called “Call To Action Principles of the Southwest Metro Tea Party Patriots” (August 4, 2010). There are so many mistaken assumptions in the Tea Party platform that it is hard to know where to begin a critique. Basically the Tea Party is wrong about most of its core assumptions about what freedom and liberty mean.

The Tea Party’s core values, as defined in this call to action, are defined as:
• Constitutionally Limited Government
• Free Markets
• Balanced Budget and Minimal Taxation

To summarize their convictions, Tea Partiers have written the following illustrating many of their major problematic assumptions. This is a quote from a much larger document but illustrates some of the fundamental assumptions of the party.

First God made the people. Then the people came to America and made the colonies. Then the colonies made the states. Then the states separated from the tyrannical British government and established a constitutional republic that guaranteed sovereignty of the people, which meant that government was the servant of the citizens.

But the Founders sternly warned us about the consequences of losing a natural rights worldview should we begin to see the government as the source instead of the protector of liberty. They knew that to violate the morally absolute natural rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence would be the death of freedom. [emphasis in original]

This short introduction to the Tea Party position illustrates a number of problematic assumptions.

Principle: Liberty means only individual rights
Not so. In fact, liberty was often tied into notions of social responsibility and public good. That part of liberty is generally absent or downplayed in Tea Party and Libertarian discourse. Notions of social responsibility and public good were central to the development of the idea of liberty in the seventeenth century, when the influential notions of natural rights were developed, and in the writing of the American founders. Liberty was never only about individual rights. Public good and social responsibility were themselves part of the liberty concept and understood to involve a sacrifice of individual rights for the larger good of society.

Principle: “First God made the people. Then the people came to America”
Many Tea Partiers, though not all, assume that “liberty comes from God.” This is often another way of saying we have natural rights. Not all Tea Partiers or libertarians base their view of freedom on this religious basis. But many do and thereby smuggle in religion to their discussion of rights. The Tea Party Platform I have in front of me makes the clear link between religious conceptions and liberty conceptions.

In fact, if Tea Partiers were really concerned about liberty they wouldn’t base everything on God. Not everyone believes in God and even those who do believe in God have very different notions of what that God is like. If Tea Partiers were really interested in individual rights they would not tie everything back to a Judeo-Christian view of God and instead find a worldview that was more inclusive, not only of other religions but the non-religious as well.

Indeed, some religious Tea Partiers want to base their views on God because they want to link a libertarian set of views to their religious convictions. While there are other, economic and “consequentialist” ways of arguing for individual rights (e.g., Friedman and Hayek and others), many Tea Partiers want to tie their arguments back to God (not unlike John Locke, and some but not all of the founders). Ultimately they end up using the notion of liberty to help justify protecting a Judeo-Christian view of the world.

Furthermore, the history of the liberty idea, which they generally ignore, shows that notions of individual liberty grew out of an attempt in part to make society more tolerant of religious diversity. The idea of natural rights, articulated by John Locke one prominent champion of natural rights in the seventeenth century, was a reaction in part to the disastrous Christian religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The idea of natural rights was in part an attempt to explain how people who fundamentally disagreed with each other about God and salvation could manage to live together without killing each other. That was no small issue for Christians after the religious wars spawned by the Reformation.

Yet the language of Tea Partiers, at least in this Southwest manifesto, ultimately abandons that view of tolerance and explicitly endorses a “Judeo-Christian” world view. “The principles in the Declaration of Independence and the symbols engraved on government buildings throughout Washington DC [sic] reflect a Judeo-Christian worldview. We pledge allegiance to divine providence and to our divinely inherited rights which government is legally required to protect, not usurp. We vehemently oppose secular humanism, nihilism, post-modernism…” A true endorsement of liberty could make room for atheists and people who don’t embrace a Judeo-Christian worldview. And it would also realize that our core notions of liberty developed in part under the influence of the modern enlightenment which was breaking out of the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview.

Principle: The Founders Embraced Natural Rights (and only that view of rights)

Many Tea Partiers want us to believe that “the founders” had a single uncomplicated notion of natural rights. They often assume those natural rights came from God (hence the emphasis on God). There are a number of problems with this position.

First, the founders themselves were not all of one mind on the matter of natural rights. I have written extensively about this in a series of essays on my Website (www.freedomandcapitalism.com) and a forthcoming book, Jefferson, Natural Rights, and The Declaration of Independence (Other Publications Press, forthcoming). The founders in fact had doubts about natural rights and they disagreed with each other on the foundation of America rights. In fact, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues disagreed with each other about the foundation of American rights.

Second, even if the founders did endorse natural rights, the very notion of natural rights itself is problematic. There are not a clear set of rights that everyone can or does agree upon. The original idea of natural rights, as articulated by Locke and others, assumes that natural rights are self-evident to Reason, and came from God. But both of those assumptions are problematic, as the history of Western Philosophy realized under the influence of many thinkers such as Hume, Kant and others just to name a few. Not all reasoning people come to the same conclusions about the origin or nature of rights and not everyone believes in God or, even if they do, embraces the same view of God’s nature.

Third, it does not really matter what the founders thought anyway. The notion that the we should embrace the founders’ views simply because they were the founders is problematic. Not only was there a diversity of views among the founders, but ultimately many of the founders envisioned that the very notion of what the boundaries of rights would be would be subject to an evolving discussion. The ability to amend the constitution built into the founding framework the notion that our thinking about rights may change over time. One could in fact argue that the founders understood that the very boundary between government and individual rights was a constantly negotiated boundary.

The upshot is that we cannot appeal to some generic view of natural rights that was embraced by the founders (there was no single view) and the notion of natural rights is problematic anyway and not a good foundation on which to discuss notions of rights. There is worthy of a much longer exposition than is possible here in this context.

Principle: The Declaration Endorses Natural Rights

The Tea Party Call To Action writes as if God created humans and then Jefferson wrote the Declaration with nothing in between! There are three problematic assumptions in the Tea Party’s appeal to the Declaration to prove the founders endorsed natural rights.

First, the Declaration actually papers over differences in the founders’ view of rights. There is clear evidence that many of the founders had doubts about natural rights theory and the idea of a social contract. Even Jefferson had an alternative view of rights that differed from and was rejected by his colleagues. There were in fact at least three or more fundamentally different views about the foundation of American rights. Jefferson’s view of rights, for example, was rejected by the First Continental Congress. Jefferson tried to get his view of rights back into the Declaration but it was rejected during the editing process. The result was that the Declaration actually hid complex disagreements among the founders on the nature of American rights. I’ve outlined these in my forthcoming book, Jefferson, Natural Rights, and the Declaration (Other Publications Press, forthcoming).

Second, it is not at all self-evident that the Declaration should be the basis of the view of rights in the United States. The Declaration declared that the colonies should become independent political states. The Declaration did not envision that there would be a United States under Federal powers.

The notion of a “United States”, which would have Federal powers beyond the states, was not fully defined until the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The views in that Convention, much more than the Declaration, should define the notion of rights by which we understand the Constitution. In those debates, there was clearly a winning view that the Articles of Confederacy were too weak and that stronger Federal powers were needed. That was the primary drive to adopt a United States Constitution and that view was ratified by the states. The Constitution therefore marked a transition to a view that the Federal government had to be stronger than it had previously been under the Articles of Confederation. Not all agreed with this view as is evident in Madison’s Notes on the Convention. But the Constitution was ratified and therefore the views prior to the Constitution, such as the Declaration, are arguably irrelevant to the United States definition of rights.

Third, it is arguable that the very notion of what rights to be protected was always something that was understood to be evolving and that the Constitution itself protects a process that allows the very definition of rights to evolve. There is after all a process in the Constitution for changing it. And the very boundaries between what government can do is always defined in part by a process between the legislative and judicial branches. If that is so, then a specific notion of rights, such as “natural rights”, is itself up for grabs in the political process. There is no single founders’ view of rights that we have to adapt and instead we are thrown back to the values by which people want to live in social life. Those values evolve and change. But the Tea Partiers are claiming, not unlike religious fundamentalists, that the founders’ intent has to somehow define the way we define liberty. Ultimately in a free society the very notion of where to draw the boundary between government intervention and individual freedom is itself part of the liberty that is granted to people in society.

Principle: Liberty means limited government

The matter is much more complex than this. The Tea Partiers assume that liberty implies limited government. But that is not what liberty always has or necessarily should mean.

If one reads the classic sources on liberty, such as John Locke, one realizes that a very different notion of liberty is operative. Locke, by the way, is important because he is often cited as having articulated the classic view of natural rights and the Tea Partiers assume that our country was founded on a vision of natural rights.

So if that is so, it is surely interesting that Locke has a more complex different notion of liberty. For Locke, people not only are protected by government but they have to give up some of their liberty to enter into political societies. This was a key part of Locke’s social contract that most Tea Partiers seem to overlook or ignore. According to Locke, one relinquishes some of one’s original liberty when one chooses to live in a society or join the social contract. In entering into a social contract with others, one agrees to abide by the decisions of the majority in exchange for the benefits of society including the protection of one’s life, liberty and property. In Locke’s view, the social contract involves a trade. One gives up something (some of one’s freedom) for the benefits one gains by living in society. In this view, liberty comes with shared responsibility for others.

Locke argues that natural rights mean that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” (Second Treatise 2, 6). It is clear that Locke has a more expansive notion of natural rights than we typically hear from Tea Partiers or Libertarians. He includes “health” in his list of natural rights. Where was that in the discussions of the health care bill?

Furthermore, Locke acknowledges that one has to pay taxes. If one took a strict view that government should not infringe on our rights at all, then there should be no taxes whatsoever. But if that were so there could be no government either. Government cannot exist without taxes. For Locke, taxes are set by the will of the majority. Therefore, in Locke’s view, there is no difference in the amount of liberty one has if one is taxed a dollar or 10,000 dollars as long as the majority set the taxes and the decision was based on a form of representation.

This is because Locke realized that ultimately one cannot define in advance what a given society will define as liberty. Whether the government should build missiles, pave roads, provide healthcare, support a judicial system, regulate commerce, manage a “standing army” are all notions that change over time and based on values. The founders’ complaint against the British Parliament was similar in the period before Independence. They complained because they were taxed without representation. They did not complain about being taxed in general.

Principle: Liberty is the same thing as free markets

Not so. This is the second frequent justification of liberty. The view that liberty necessarily implies free markets is a view that has been articulated by Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, among others. According to Friedman, economic liberty is part and parcel of liberty. It is part of liberty by definition.

But this view is wrong in a number of respects. First, it mixes up the question of individual liberty with the question of institutional regulation. Regulating an institution and the economy is not the same thing as imposing rules on individuals. The founders were fighting for economic liberty from the British government and from a Parliament in which they did not have representation. They never said that their own governments in which they had representation couldn’t set limits on trade. And one of the drivers from the Articles of Confederation to a United States Constitution was the problem of regulating trade among the colonies.

Second, the view that “liberty = free markets” prescribes a particular view of what liberty means. But liberty itself protects our very right to debate the very question of where the line between government and individuals should be drawn. That question is ultimately a value judgment as to what is good for the maximum number of people. Some economists believe that free markets generate the most benefit for the most people. But not even all economists agree with that view.

In any case, that question – “what does liberty mean”- should ultimately be decided by democracies, not imposed by government itself. Therefore the amount of government control in an economy is not an infringement of individual liberty but a decision that is and should be made within a liberal society. To prescribe a predefined answer to that question, as Tea Partiers do, is ultimately to take away the very liberty they claim they want to defend. The question is always what values should define that boundary between the public good and individual rights.