DANIEL HANNAN: THE GUARDIAN LIBELS THE TEA PARTY
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10255,css.print/pub_detail.asp
Much easier to deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a freedom-loving Right.
So says the headline in The Guardian, but I’ve read the accompanying article three times, and I’m blowed if I can see where the headline comes from. The writer, Amanda Marcotte, says some disobliging things about the Tea Party (”they’re the most Bible-thumping-est part of the rightwing base as well as the most racist – these things tend to go together”), and then mentions that a high school in Missouri has banned a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Banning books is, of course, always and everywhere a bad idea, but there is no suggestion that the Missouri parents are Tea Partiers or, indeed, part of any wider movement.
What interests me here is not one jejune article, but the almost desperate insistence by Lefties that the Tea Party is not, in fact, what it claims to be, viz a protest against big government. On both sides of the Atlantic, Tea Partiers are portrayed in broadcast and print media as a gaggle of stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men who can’t get used to the idea of a mixed race president. So far, though, the US electorate has refused to fall for it. To most American voters, the proposition that levels of taxation, spending and borrowing are too high seems remarkably moderate.
The book-banning trope is an old favourite. When Sarah Palin was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate, bogus emails about the books she had supposedly banned from Alaska’s libraries surged around the web, often finding their way into the MSM. At the same time, commentators leapt on her statement that CS Lewis was her favourite author. How typical, they sneered, that a small-minded Christian should enjoy children’s books. Never mind CS Lewis’s corpus of work on English literature and philosophy, never mind his adult fiction, never mind, indeed, the extraordinary quality of the books he wrote primarily for children. Lefties were smug in their certainty: their ignorance established Palin’s ignorance.
In Britain, we get the same line from our state broadcaster. In Beeb-world, “Right-wing” means something along the lines of “dim-witted xenophobe who has opposed every progressive reform since the Catholic Emancipation”. The idea that Rightists might in fact be libertarians who are sick of being bossed, nannied and expropriated by self-serving bureaucracies is simply too difficult. Much easier to press conservatives into the template of misogynist, anti-gay etc.
Still, the awkward fact remains that, in Britain and the US, levels of government spending and borrowing are way beyond what even Left-of-Centre parties would have considered acceptable as recently as four years ago. Most voters know it. Sooner or later, the MSM are going to have to engage with that argument.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Daniel Hannan is a British writer and journalist. He has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism.
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