Round one to the Tea Party

GIVE RESPECT where respect's due. I may find the politics of America's so-called Tea Party odious, but they won this battle fair and square.

Last week, conservative Republicans succeeded in forcing the White House to accept a revised debt-ceiling which will require substantial austerity, and a freeze on taxes. The Obama administration had argued, unsuccessfully, for a more balanced approach. Arguably, the Tea Partiers pulled off this coup because they have captured a major edge over their opponents on the left: they have One Big Idea.

While simple, their One Big Idea encapsulates a whole philosophy. Government is a necessary evil, and so it's necessary to keep it under wraps, with limited power. The less government you can get away with, the better.

Practically, they maintain, the less regulated a market, the less intrusive a state, the lower the taxes, the more dynamic will be the economy and society. While the United States public sector's share of GDP is smaller than in most Western countries, American conservatives nonetheless maintain that the state has grown too fat and is stifling the economic rebound.

I find the idea rather simple and easily dispelled. Beyond the philosophical arguments that justify the use of the public sector as a means not only to invigorate an economy, but to create a more harmonious society, there is the practical matter that cutting back spending in a recession will probably slow the already-tepid recovery.

But sadly, the US left has no Big Idea of its own. It has become bogged down in a defence of vested interest. Not without cause, the public sector has come to be seen as the preserve of public-sector unions and influential lobbies. Rather than make a case for the constructive role of the state, the Democratic Party appears to spend too much of its time defending the interests of its constituents.

Lacking faith

When the debt-ceiling debate entered its critical intensive phase over the previous-to-last weekend, I was struck by a passage reported in the Washington Post. One of the Tea Party congressman, asked how he would vote, quoted a passage from the Bible about debt. Even if one could make a strong case to him that the government can be used to better serve the public interest, it matters little to one of strong faith. And that kind of faith is lacking on the left.

That's a real pity. One can point to Democratic presidents who used the state and public policy to transform America for the better, presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson (whose Great Society initiative was sadly overwhelmed by the Vietnam War he inherited from John F. Kennedy). But today, Democrats don't offer us much in the way of Rooseveltian politics.

On the contrary, I would submit that at a key moment in the country's history, when the left controlled both congress and the presidency, government did in fact fail the American people. When he came to office, in the midst of an epochal financial crisis, President Obama had the opportunity to use the levers of economic policy to transform the country. What did he do? He brought in the same sorry lot of Wall Streeters who had helped create the crisis in the first place, the Tim Geithners and Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs alumni around them, and put economic policy in their hands.

The rest is a bitter history that no self-respecting leftist would want to defend. Taxpayer money was used to underwrite an inflation of bank profits and fat bonuses, and the stimulus package was used to support all manner of pork-barrel projects. The result is a hefty debt and an economy going nowhere fast. So much for the creative state.

I can't blame the Tea Partiers for screaming 'enough!' If that's the best the left will deliver America, it can be no wonder the right have grasped a golden opportunity. But the price the US may pay is high. The Tea Party vision is a deeply flawed one, and their recipe of austerity and tax benefits for the rich will likely deepen the country's long-term malaise.

John Rapley is a Bradlow fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and rapley.john@gmail.com.