The Tea Party and Why Nearly all of my 60 College Students are Libertarian

If you were to ask my students about their party affiliation in a public forum, you would get hesitation.  None of them would want to commit for two reasons.  Most of them are disillusioned with the current major party dysfunction and are, consequently, non-committal.  The other reason is that those who do identify themselves with one of the major parties are ill-equipped to defend their choice should their party be challenged.  I believe that if I were to anonymously ask them to write their party affiliation on a piece of paper (I will do this next Tuesday), they would be bolder, but there would still be a large greater percentage of them (greater than you would find in the overall population) who would commit to no party.

There are several ways to read this.  You could argue that they choose political affiliation the same way they date, noncommittally.  You could argue that, due to a neutered public school curriculum, 90210 and a life of relative ease, they are not educated enough to formulate a position.  These may be contributors, but they are certainly not major drivers.  At least one major driver is the embarrassing dysfunction that the two major parties suffer.  My students would rather not go to the prom than show up with an ugly date.

There is a sociological way to find out party affiliation without asking the party affiliation question.  You could develop a survey of socioeconomic and political attitudes.  My informal, unscientific survey indicated that 80% of the students in my class are Libertarians.  They believe that government should be limited, and certainly smaller than it is now, and that government intrusion into other aspects of peoples lives is unwarranted as long as others are not hurt by their actions.

And why wouldn’t they be Libertarians?  Most of them have had severely inadequate training in civics and history, yet they do know about debt and about how stupid it is to spend now and pay later.  Most of my students also have some training in economics and understand that, contrary to what many advocates of healthcare reform say, profit potential drives efficiency and effectiveness.  They have also been exposed to psychology (unfortunately, they picked up a lot of intellectual guano along with the cool stuff they learned) which told them that people respond to incentives.  Government is remarkable effective at incentivizing mediocrity, sloth and entitlement.

So far, government power expanders like W, Obama, and congress have tiptoed into the national political bedroom to ask for a drink of water.  The pattern repeats itself.   The snoozing parents (you and me), dreaming of prosperous utopias shake off  just enough narcotic induced haze to say, nearly incoherently and halfway into the pillow, “just go get a cup and get some water from the faucet.”  Sleep quickly returns and the world is forgotten.  But then, one night, the child walked into the bedroom, asked for a glass of healthcare reform water, was given the same message as in other nights and, as in other nights, went to the liquor cabinet and poured a glass of vodka.  This time, the child’s emboldened carelessness caused the bottles to clang loudly enough to wake us.  Many of us awakened as if from an electric shock.  We are angry and embarrassed that we have not been better parents and vow to rehab the child and pay more attention.

[Note to self:  There are several candidates that deserve the 'narcotic sleep aid' label.  CNN, NBC, CBS, DNC, RNC, NYT and NEA come to mind.]

Some of  us, Massachusetts voters for instance, opt to give the child a good, hard spanking.

The Tea Party

David Brooks wrote the following in the New York Times:

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

Maybe I’m the last guy to learn what the “Educated Class” is.   I asked a friend who told me, “The Educated Class are people who are not mountaineers but buy a lot of North Face stuff.  They buy Volvo’s.  They eat edamame.  They see “films.”  They don’t bowl.  They pay too much for beer.  They would rather eat Shaq’s socks than drive an Impala.  They go to church for one week after Brad Pitt makes a televised plea for prayer.  They only got into fly fishing when Tom Brokaw copped to it.”  [Okay, so far I would have called them arrogant, elitist, spoiled snobs.  I'm still wondering where the "educated" part comes in.]  “They might talk to their parents more if Angelina Jolie started talking to Jon Voight again.”  [hmmm, still no discussion of education]  “They smoke pot but don’t get arrested for it.”  [At least that takes some education] “They believe conformity is okay as long as it’s expensive.”  The point is that the label, “Educated,” may be as shallow as the people it describes.

If there were a Tea Party poster child, it would be Glenn Beck.  If you have any doubt about Beck’s influence and power, check THIS out.  It may be that the data are skewed.  It may be that the data that I collected so unscientifically are a falsification of real phenomena.  You may say that the sample I drew the data from had too many rednecks to be representative.  You may say that the university where I teach is dangerously unenlightened.  Regardless of the maybe’s, my money is on the Tea Party’s continued rise.  My money is also on my students, which is pretty much the same bet.