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The Tea Party Defined, Part 3: Grasping The Ideology

Abstract Thinking and Ideology

The role of abstract thinking in understanding political ideology can be explained in Psychology terms, another field I taught for most of my 34 years as an instructor and Professor in Academia.  According to the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget in his later work, although brain development proceeds from the primitive level of having difficulty grasping concrete concepts like that a thing does not disappear just because it is hidden, to the most advanced, abstract thinking, the latter takes the most extensive education to understand, and most of us only ever understand the abstracts relating to our main job field.

If Piaget was right, unless political science was your major you probably are having a hard time grasping the abstracts of a term like “Constitutional Reactionary” which Part One suggested is the label which should be applied to understand most “Tea Party patriots.”  Let’s review the concept to give you another chance to understand this very important term so you can make better sense of what is happening in American politics today and make better judgements on where we should be going in the future.

Constitutionalisn vs. Liberalism

“Constitutional” of course relates to the US Constitution. A “Constitutionalist” is a believer in the importance of sticking to the Constitution as much as possible, citing its apparent success in raising the living standards of the US higher than any other nation in the world since it was first applied in 1791.

A Constitutionalist therefore views the proper basis of American government very differently from a “Liberal,” who is someone who, knowingly or not, accepts the notion that we must have a “Living Constitution.” “Living Constitution” is a loaded Liberal terms which sounds absolutely necessary (who could possibly think it is a good idea to be governed under a “Dead” one?).  But it means that instead of using the Constitution as the basic rule of law, and its pronouncements as the basis of judging any suggested change, the document must be periodically reinterpreted  so that it does not stand in the way of “progress.”

As far as I’ve been able to determine this idea first originated in the early 1880s as part of a rationale in a Supreme Court decision suggested by the distinguished Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  But whatever its origins, the important thing to consider is whether periodic “updates” outside the normal amendment process are worthwhile, or threaten to render the Constitution itself meaningless.

If “the sun rises in the east” was true yesterday, and is true today, but tomorrow five of nine determine that somehow “the sun rises in the west” is more useful to avoid some “progressive” change being struck down as unconstitutional, and they so rule, then how useful is the statement “the sun rises in the east” as truth?  And if not truth, then isn’t it a useless phrase?

Likewise, if a majority of five of nine decides at some point that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” does not mean that every individual has the right to own a firearm for self defense or any other purpose, because the statement is preceded by “A militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” and nowadays the term militia means the “National Guard” (which did not exist at the time of the approval of the Constitution), is the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution rendered meaningless to anyone outside the National Guard?  And if at some point in the future, when the world might become safe enough that a National guard is not needed or we cannot afford it, and is abolished, then does the Second Amendment mean anything?

Reactionary vs. Revolutionary

“Reactionary” is the only historically used term to apply to anyone who dislikes the present but knows enough about the past to want society to go back to it.  If you are at all wistful about wishing to return to your childhood, for example, you are in that way a Reactionary. “Reactionary” is the only term which accurately describes that Tea Party patriots are not “conservatives” who merely want to maintain the status quo, because politically in some ways they want to go back to the way things were in an earlier time.

The opposite is the much more commonly used term “Revolutionary.”  A Revolutionary wants to dramatically change society to something never before tried, something largely new.  A Socialist Revolutionary wants the American national government to have full control over the US economy, so that it can then distribute wealth in the form of jobs, housing, food, clothing, health care and any other needed thing.  “To each according to his need” in the words of Karl Marx.

Varieties of Socialism

A National Socialist Revolutionary or Fascist favors government economic control within the context of the sovereign nation state.  An International Socialist Revolutionary or Communist wants to seize power in a violent revolution, and when most other nations have had their Communist revolutions, wealth redistribution can proceed done around the world.   When everyone has about the same amount of wealth, national governments will no longer be very necessary or powerful and will thus “wither away,” and a universally altruistic and benevolent global order will be established.

An International Evolutionary Socialist or Revisionist Socialist also wants these goals, but prefers to accomplish them in small, measured steps by periodically gaining majorities of support in national legislatures.  Ideally, by presenting themselves merely as Reformers, they might even get one of their own elected chief executive.  Such as Barack Obama, whose whole life has centered around getting into a position where he can advance Communism and dramatically “redistribute wealth” according to his notion of fairness.

“Progress” Redefined

So a “Constitutional Reactionary” is anyone who believes we have travelled too far away from the original Constitution and need to move back towards revering it as the basis of the rule of law as it was written, including the amendments added to it through the procedure specified in the document itself aka the “amendment process” rather than by judicial judgement of what is best for progress.

Constitutional Reactionaries believe that the “Living Constitution” concept which the judicial system in this country has been operating under irregularly since at least the 1880s has rendered the rule of the Constitution’s law nearly meaningless because it has made it so flexible as to weaken or destroy many of the boundaries it originally set on the power of government over individual citizens’ lives.  They want to have the entire system reevaluated and rejudged more in terms of what the Constitution originally was intended to provide: maximum individual freedom and minimum government intrusion.

Admittedly they would pare government according to current majority views of what is “necessary.”  That might leave in place some institutions which the original document had not provided for or anticipated, which would still mean a larger, more expensive and demanding government than the one created in the 1790s.

But it would be a move in the right direction, now that huge bloated expensive government has become far more of a burden and a threat to the individual citizen’s happiness than what the Constitution originally outlined.  And it would repudiate decisively the slow but inexorible move towards absolute government power which American Socialists have led over the last one hundred and thirty years.