Tea Partiers and Four Tidbits

It started with an op-ed in the LA Times on Thursday, “Tea Partying like it’s 1968.” The premise was based on research that indicates self-described Tea Partiers are smarter, more educated, and more wealthy that is commonly believed. The lesson drawn by the authors, is that core of the Tea Party Movement are children of the ‘60s, and are “replaying the ‘60s protest paradigm.” (Nice consonance there, too!).

“In their wonder years, they learned that politics was about protesting the Establishment and shouting down the Man.”

Wow. Who knew that the anti-war protesters of the ‘60s became the tax protestors of whatever we call this decade? As a rhetorical flourish, it completely proves that even if the writers were in that generation, they were not of it.

The reality is that coming of age in the ‘60s didn’t define one’s character one way or another. While the period is remarkable for creating a widespread social movement (anti-war morphing into anti-government/authority/establishment), not everyone felt themselves to be in any way a part of that movement. Dick Cheney refused to serve, but that doesn’t make him anti-war. The same can be said of Don Rumsfield.

As in any population, in any culture, a society is as defined by its differences as much as by its similarities. The period we call the ‘60s was a whirlpool of starkly different groupings of values and beliefs. There were significant inter- and intra-generational differences. The pitched battles of the ‘60s are still being fought throughout American culture and institutions, and it is at least silly, if not downright stupid, to simply class it all as the “me generation.”

Once I worked through that issue, I reflected that there seems to be a social need to “explain” the Tea Baggers. As humans, we like to feel we understand things, so we look for patterns and meaning. And we build simple definitions. But to the delight (or frustration) of the pundits, the Tea Party resists easy description or even interior agreement beyond a few core issues.

To the extent they have a common philosophy, it is closest to the values associated with the right’s “base:” low/no taxes, rugged individualism, gun rights, purity of culture (Christian, English-speaking), and a pervasive anti-intellectaulism, a visceral distrust of people who know more than they do, especially if it’s facts. All science is, by definition, junk science.

That still leaves the question why, if they’re relatively well educated they seem so suspicious of factual, scientific knowledge (granted that the level of education isn’t exactly the same as “intelligence”). Which leads to my second tidbit. A couple of days ago, I saw a story on CNN headlined “Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ.” Okay, that might be an insight into political attitudes and mental acuity. Reading the article did not lead to that answer, or not exactly.

Just as the headline says, the correlation of these “liberal” tendencies is to IQ specifically. My thinking is that minds that are open to questioning and that are looking past “conventional” wisdom (more "liberal") are more likely to score higher in an IQ test. That is how the test is written.

The point is that some humans are relatively comfortable with change and ambiguity. Other humans are more comfortable with stability and a clear moral order. Some humans see the value of finding ways to work with others, other people think it self-destructive not to aggressively protect what you have.

These are not absolute categories – but then I would say that because I’m a liberal, atheist, hetero-identified white guy. With a high IQ. So I’m naturally suspicious of categories and simple answers.

So, I ask myself, what would it be like if I was a smart guy and wasn’t liberal and wanted clear directives? And that brings me to my third tidbit: a blog entry a couple of days ago on Ayn Rand and her fascination, for a time, with a serial murderer who became something of a celebrity in the ‘20s.

I admit that I have never understood the popularity of Ayn Rand, especially among people who certainly cannot be called unintelligent. My basic feeling is that her philosophy seemed uncannily attuned to the mental state of certain high-performing, sex-addled adolescents – something that you should grow out of at a certain point. So I’m curious about the pull that John Galt and Adam Roark exert on some people, and how these books describe a better world for Rand’s fans.

The article’s point is that Rand built key characteristics of her heroes on what she saw as the character strengths of one William Edward Hickman. His string of killings culminated with the kidnapping, strangulation and dismemberment of a 12-year old girl. He then showed up to collect the ransom with the torso and head of the little girl, eyes wired open to make her appear alive and attached to wires so Hickman could make her move in a lifelike manner. Nice guy.

What Rand wrote in her notebooks about Hickman was that he had:

"… no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

Which is exactly how she described Roark in The Fountainhead: “he was born without the ability to consider others.”

I am also making a generalization that Tea Partiers are more apt than Democrats to quote Rand . I don’t have quantitative evidence for that, but I feel pretty safe.

Perhaps Rand’s appeal is simply in the assertion that the only thing that matters to me is my implacable will. I don’t really have to explain, I don’t have to question, I just have to act to make me as free as possible.

The problem is that in Rand's world, as in real life, anybody who threatens my freedom (even another Randian asserting his/her freedom?) can be classified as a parasite or insect that needs to be eliminated. By definition, losers don’t matter. In some cases, especially in this culture, it comes to guns.

So perhaps part of our fascination, based on what some Tea Baggers are saying about dealing with traitors/progressives/liberals and keeping a gun close by, is that the rest of us want some warning if they do go off.

I also do expect that there are few Tea Partiers that are really down with the entire Randian superman sociopath thing. Most of us are aware that we are bound to others, whether we were born that way or not.

So the whole Tea Party-Rand thing was echoing in my head for a while, and I found the fourth tidbit of the title, in an article by Niall Ferguson titled Complexity and Collapse. The article itself is worth reading – a warning about the propensity of great civilizations to collapse in a metaphorical heartbeat. But the thing that spoke to me and helped me sort out my TP questions was the reference to an influential article written in the ‘60s by historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

As a general description, “paranoid” seems to describe a lot of the rhetoric coming from the TPers, but Hofstadter gets more specific, for example:

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

 “… [The paranoid mind] is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. “

 “… The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).”

 The point, for me, is that paranoia is a part of the human cultural psyche. What I know of history says that paranoia has always played a role in human social forms. And of course, paranoia might on occasion serve a useful purpose. Of course, the human genius has been the ability to balance caution with action. If you never got to the waterhole because there might be lions waiting, you will die of thirst.

The other genius of American culture is our very fractiousness – it is extremely difficult to create a real mob around any single idea or leader, right or left, paranoid or optimist,  Tea Bagger or Coffee Partier. That may be something to be thankful for.

The take-away for me is to remember the wisdom of Michael Corleoni: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

Moral Hazards

One term that keeps popping up in discussions of the finance bailout (e.g., John Stossel a couple of weeks ago and in the WaPo this morning) is "moral hazard". The term has also been referred to in debates about health insurance. But you probably haven't heard a good definition of what the words actually mean.


The term dates back to the 1600s and was widely used in the British insurance industry by the 1800s. Wikipedia defines it as a special case of information asymmetry -- the advantage that goes to a party who has more information than the counterparty being negotiated with. In this sense, the moral hazard arises in that if one has special or inside information he will be tempted to use that information to "game" the transaction. At bottom is probably the idea that he would be a fool not to do so, and so the hazard or asymmetry must be identified and mitigated before the transaction is final.


In the current debate, commentators on the right, like Stossel, are appealing to another sense of "moral," in the sense that it is immoral not to properly punish a bad decision or mismanagement. Just like we make sure a house fire is an accident before putting it out, and lifeguards make sure the swimmer didn't just decide to venture too far out, and ER doctors first decide who's wrong or right before treating a gunshot. Oh, right. That's not the way life works in this modern, western, judeo-christian culture. Correction and improvement is one thing;  punishment is something else entirely.


This is not just abstract, soft-headed charity, agape or eros. We have learned, through many hard lessons, that a neighbor's fire can burn our house, no matter who started it. It used to be that if you hadn't bought insurance from the fire fighters, your house was going to burn, no matter who started it. As a society we decided the price was too high -- to everybody.


In the last few years, there are some individuals, mostly but not entirely on the right, who have argued there is a moral hazard inherent in robust health care insurance -- people will use too much of it. If health care is too cheap, they'll just go running to the doctor for any frivolous reason at all. It doesn't matter that real life doesn't support this psychological tale; it was a textbook example of moral hazard, as defined by health insurers. And it was their argument for making the system difficult and mean: "We are removing the moral hazard for their own moral good. (And our profits.)"


So let us return to the failure and bailout of the financial sector of the economy. It is ironic to me that the system, again largely defined and sold by the right but support by key characters on the left, actually installed moral hazard in the system more than 30 years by assuring information asymmetry in the system itself. The key reason for removing oversight of banks and brokerages was that they -- the finance pros -- knew best, only they had the info to make the best choices and make the market work at its optimal efficiency. Left to these wise men, the market would just take care of itself. And I'm not even talking about quants! (Some other time, perhaps.)


This gospel was largely preached by the so-called Chicago School economists. The neoclassical offspring of von Hayek and Friedman, they believed they understood how to insure efficient markets. They leveraged a uniquely adolescent understanding of the world (Rand-ian objectivism/libertarianism) into an economic theory that valued concise measurements and simple predictive models, predicated on (universal) rational self-interest. They have stood astride the global economy of the last three or four decades convinced of the perfectibility of their models, and look how well it's worked! 


Former Fed chief Paul Greenspan (a youthful acolyte of Ayn Rand's) rode his absolute conviction about the ultimate aim of economy's arrow right to the ground and only expressed mild chagrin that he hadn't -- that the industry hadn't -- foreseen the role of inefficient greed and self-destructive ambition. He still doesn't have his head around that. Who is John Galt, indeed.


When they talk to themselves, the right seems to be pretty comfortable trotting out "moral" issues. But what can be said about the morality of letting others suffer -- in terms of under- and un-employment, inadequate and uneven health care, a growing disparity between wealthy elites and not-quite-making-it proles -- while preaching moral hazard? Even if you don't actually say "Let them eat brioche?"