U.S. Mid Term Elections and the Tea Party
There is something very interesting going on in America. On this side of the Atlantic all people are aware of is the simple fact of elections, in which either the Democrats of Republicans will win the most seats in both Houses of Congress. There is also something called a Tea Party.
What is the Tea Party? It is a fundamentalist movement within the Republican Party, dedicated to reducing hugely the size, cost and reach of the Federal government. No one knows how its candidates will fare on the day, nor how they will act if they are elected. Let us remind ourselves what America is and in that we shall find, if not the answer, a significant clue.
America is a country made up of independent states, all with their own governments, but linked together by a Constiution to provide a common defence and to guarantee freedoms under the law for all its citizens. First came the people, then came the colonies which became the states and after that came the Union of the states. Everything was built from the bottom up, with the individual as the root of all. The famous line we the people says it all. It does not say on behalf of the people we.
The citizens who came from overseas to make this nation came first from Europe, then from the world over, some in wealth, others, the masses, in poverty, driven by a common faith. This was not a faith in one or other God, nor in one or other interpretation of what their chosen God expected. It was faith in themselves as individuals who, fettered by oppression, ground by poverty, or bereft of opportunity, left the land of their birth to seek a new horizon. This was that, in freedom from all oppression and the heavy hand of government, they would seize that opportunity and upon their own backs and through the output of their own toil, they would first make themselves, then together, forge their new nation, in which the people and the people alone, were the sovereign power.
The road was hard and long. It ran with blood. Not all the story is good. Not all the record shines with honour. But taken as a whole project, it must rank as the among the most profound and the most admirable ever undertaken by civilised man. The whole enterprise was established to turn government from shadow to light, to make it do the bidding of the people not bid the people what to do. It is utterly incompatible with big government, because it was this oppressive concept from which its founders had fled and against which they had fought, and which, in the framing of their Constitution, those founding idealists were determined ever after to deny.
Thus was laid down a fault line, the tectonic plates of which produced a great deal of argument, culminating in Civil War. It has rumbled on, deep down, throughout the politics of the United States of America. It has engaged first one political party then the other. It rumbles again now and the noise is getting louder. It is interesting not just to Americans, but to all the world, not because the outcome can be foreseen, but because it cannot.
The Tea Party is not a political party, nor is it truly a movement, nor even a campaign. It is an instinct, a deep abiding faith in the primacy of the individual, for better or for worse. Either are in prospect. Possibly both. None can be sure what forces will be empowered, nor what energy will be released. Nothing may happen, yet something may. Anything is possible. This is not about any country. This is about America.