Some have expressed hopes that the tea partiers, many of whom grew out of the Ron Paul movement, will bring about a shift away from American imperialism through their demands for smaller, cheaper, less intrusive, and more accountable government. But it ain’t necessarily so. The tea partiers generally fail to understand that the indispensable element in the explosive growth of big government over the past ten years has been Washington’s failure to craft a foreign and security policy that is commensurate with the nation’s resources and proportional to the actual level of threat that exists in the world. This results in the tea partiers overwhelmingly supporting an aggressive security policy even though they must know that leaving the Pentagon budget untouched and untouchable guarantees deficit spending and continued growth of the parts of government that are allegedly committed to “keeping us free.”
Tea partiers must begin to understand that accepting the calls of leaders like Palin and Gingrich for smaller and more sensible government and a return to constitutionalism without also understanding that they stand for an incoherent foreign policy, perpetual war, and ballooning deficits is self defeating. They are both traditional Republicans who want nothing more than to return the GOP to power. Only when you begin to question the raison d’etre for the wars and put an end to the American empire can you stop writing a blank check every year for the Pentagon, stop borrowing money to fund the fighting, and take sensible steps to reduce the size of government, making it again answerable to the people. As the memory of the overhyped terrorist threat fades, you might even begin to restore some of those civil liberties that have been stripped away by the Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act, and the increasingly frequent assertion of state secrets privilege.
Is it imaginable that the Tea Parties might turn in that direction? Perhaps not, though much depends on the extent to which the Republican Party and people like Palin, Gingrich, and Boehner are able to co-opt the movement. If they do, the revolt will fizzle out and turn into George W. Bush lite, or perhaps not so lite, with complete adherence to the consensus politics that created the current mess in the first place. Hard to imagine, but if the tea parties take a large share of the vote and align behind policies embraced by the likes of Gingrich and Palin, things could actually get worse.
