Two mind-sets characterize the Tea Party movement. One, as I’ve noted before, is fundamentalism: adhering to the letter of a revered document. This means taking the Bible literally when it comes to Creation and the implications of the Eden fable. And it means interpreting the Constitution as if nothing has changed since 1787.
The other mind-set is paranoia. When you trace the conservative movement back to the Goldwater insurgency, one of its hallmarks was a rabid fear of Communists. Today we have in its place a rabid fear of Muslims that rivals Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. And the unbroken thread running through the movement for fifty years has been a paranoid attitude toward government, which has now gone from New Deal backlash to Ron Paul questioning the legitimacy of federal disaster relief.
What these two attitudes have in common is closed-mindedness. No quarter is given to any argument that rebuts these beliefs or fears, witness the pride some GOP presidential candidates take in refuting evolution, or the lock-step intransigence of House Republicans in the recent budget imbroglio. Representative government used to be based on compromise, but not if the resurgent Right has its way.
Recognizing the ridiculousness of anti-communist paranoia – and the fact that a socialist form of government might be appropriate for some countries – was what began to turn my own head from its Youth-for-Goldwater fervor. What facilitated this change of mind was simply the process of education, which required a willingness to consider all sides of an argument – which is something that teabaggers seem unwilling (or unable) to do.
Education does a lot for breaking through the stranglehold of fundamentalism as well.
The by-now classic TP protest sign “Get Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” says it all: teabaggers make a lot of noise, but there’s not much thought behind it. They haven’t merely closed their minds to other points of view; they’ve slammed it shut.
