Tea Party Group Tells Objectivists Where to Go

Some Tea Party "patriots" got bitchy about an Objectivist group that wanted to join their coalition. Surprise, surprise. A group of Minnesota Objectivists tried to join the coalition that made up the local Tea Party. The Christians that control the Tea Party had fits and eventually the Objectivists withrdrew. Had this "Objectivist" group had paid any attention to Rand they would know that the Tea Party is not a group that they should join and would not have the humiliation of retreating.

Rand thought multi-issue coalitions were unstable and bad ideas and that one would get dragged into the mud on the issues where one’s allies were bad. Second, she despised conservatives, especially religious conservatives. She referred to them as the "God-Family-Tradition swamp." Third, Rand thought that attempting to justify capitalism or individual rights on the basis of religion would backfire because it implied there is no rational justification for these ideas, only mystical inventions.

Now, one Tea Party writer, Walter Hudson, tries to defend Rand to the Tea Party. What a crock! He claims that the reason these advocates of irrationalism attacked the Objectivist group is because "attacks upon religious expression by a relentless secular minority have placed many religious people on the defensive.” For people on the defensive, they spend a lot of time being offensive, in every sense of the word. I would like to see a list of these attacks on religious expression.

How libertarian is the Tea Party? Not very!

One of the great urban legends in American politics is that the so-called Tea Party movement is libertarian, or significantly libertarian. All the data I’ve seen, and personal experience, has indicated to me that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly conservative, in every sense of the word, and not libertarian at all.

I have no doubt that some libertarians participate in this movement. That is their right, and their problem. But adding a sprinkling of salt to your bath doesn’t make it the Pacific Ocean, and adding a handful of libertarians to conservative movement doesn’t make the movement libertarian. Given how outnumbered the libertarians are by conservatives I suggest that the influence is more likely to push these libertarians in a conservative direction, than the other way around. Many would consciously alter libertarian theory in order to sound more acceptable to their new conservative friends. Others will simply adopt the unthinking, Right-wing views of the Tea Party as their own.

Various surveys and polls have clearly shown the Tea Party to be typically conservatives, at least in regards to today’s conservative movement. It was more religious than the Republican Party but less religious than the Religious Right.