And I think this is one of the things that drives the Left absolutely batty. Even as they are all about the Collective, unlike the Founders, they just are flabbergasted that the Right, made up of people purporting to be wrapped around Individualism, basically have out-collectived the Collective. Matt Kibbe, the head of FreedomWorks (an organization that has helped the TEA Party, and I have met and talked with Matt and other representatives of FreedomWorks as a TEA Party activist) wrote this Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine):
Despite all of this, in America Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by many in the media and the Democratic party as a legitimate counter to the tea party. All of the accusations that were wrongfully hurled at the tea party—from bigotry to violent tendencies—now seem to be occurring regularly at OWS protests. Yet they are ignored in deference to the supposed morally superiority of this new movement. Van Jones, formerly an environmental advisor to President Barack Obama, says we should ignore OWS defects because "they’ve got moral clarity." Even Mr. Obama has said that "the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."
Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the left. Can the king of crony capitalism win reelection having codified "too big to fail" into law? Can Congressional Democrats, having spent the past two years attaching Republicans to so-called "tea party extremism," now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence and property damage of OWS?
Progressives’ burning desire to create a tea party of the left may be clouding their judgment. Even Mr. Jones has grudgingly conceded that tea partiers have out-crowd-sourced, out-organized, and out-performed the most sophisticated community organizers on the left. "Here’s the irony," he said back in July. "They talk rugged individualist, but they act collectively." He and his colleagues don’t seem to understand that communities can’t exist without respect for individual freedom. They can’t imagine how it is that millions of people located in disparate places with unique knowledge of their communities and circumstances can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate, creating something far greater and more valuable than any one individual could have done alone.
Indeed – an "Army of Davids" which is the name of the book that Glen Reynolds wrote in describing how technology is shifting such that individuals can band together for a purpose via the ‘Net, accomplish a voluntary goal, and then disband in ways that never would have been possible before. In fact, many Conservatives and TEA Partiers used the Internet to get their message (visual: Skip waving his hand!) out and coordinating with others in a joint movement. I am pleased that GraniteGrok has been part of this movement and have participated in tactical events both in State as well as National ones.
Moral Clarity?
The TEA Party has operated under three main principles:
- Fiscal Responsibility
- Limited Government
- Free Markets
None of those are possible without the underlying philosophy that is the Right to Private Property – something that the Occupy Wall Streeters and their backers seem not to understand. The TEA Party, while activating a swarm of new political activists like never seen before on the right, is built on a moral code:
- Our Republic is built on the respect for Private Property
- Our Constitution is our most fundamental foundation for Law
What the Left did was to finally push Conservatives "to the edge"; having tolerated behavior contrary to those above points, and not having ever gone "the protest route" before, we did not have the organizational baggage that the Left had. Thus, having no "legacy systems" in place, we utilized the newer ways of organization.
Add in the decades long of the non-stop assaults on traditional values and the proverbial match to fuse was when Obama and the Left decided to Change the traditional value of "be responsible about your mortgage" to "hey, pay for your spend like there’s no tomorrow neighbor’s mortgage. Helping with a hand up was ok, even has it seemed like it became constant and long term. But when we saw ourselves as being forced to be "the ATM of the irresponsible", we saw that for Obama, that would only be the start (and he has done nothing to allay those fears).