Another Oldie

       While I intend to post a historic op-ed only now and then, I do want to match one of my favorites (see previous post) with an op-ed in which I was dead wrong. Since I have a copy of the printed version in my computer, you will also see how they were treated by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wednesday March 10, 2010

OPINION / PERSPECTIVES

Tea Party paranoia is nothing new

Fear-mongering has always been with us, but it never wins in the end

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

By Rudolph H. Weingartner

It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil and religious institutions.

-- So it was "reported" in a Texas newspaper in 1855.

There is much to regale one when reading historian Richard Hofstadter's 1965 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." While the citation above speaks darkly of foreign foes, plenty of others from the beginnings of the American experience berate the enemy within.

Masons and Mormons have been accused of nefarious plots against the right-thinking; so have Catholics and Jews. Add the racial or ethnic group of your choice. Muslims have been a favorite lately.

Some enemies never seem to go out of fashion. A 1954 book was titled "The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil," more than half a century before Andrew Stack aimed his plane at an IRS office in Austin, killing himself and one employee.

This dramatic event was not an outlier. In just five years, threats against IRS employees have increased by nearly 25 percent, to 1,014 in 2009. The enemy is within, didn't you know?

If you thought Gen. George C. Marshall was the last word in competence and rectitude, be enlightened by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was quite sure that "his decisions, maintained with great stubbornness and skill, always and invariably served the world policy of the Kremlin."

If you thought Dwight Eisenhower was a mildly conservative president, be enlightened by Robert (grape jelly) Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, who considered him "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" -- a conclusion "based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put his conviction beyond any reasonable doubt."

And so, with Yogi Berra, I observe that it is deja vu all over again.

The best evidence of this is contained in a brilliant Feb. 16 New York Times article by David Barstow: "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right."

Many of the tea partiers were not involved in politics until prodded by misfortunes attributed to the recession. The newness of their plunge into the fray explains in part the radical nature of their proposals: Get rid of the Fed, the income tax, Social Security, not to mention bailouts and stimulus bills, even Medicare (a government program on which the government should keep its hands off!).

As for so many in the past, to the tea partiers the world is full of conspiracies, with President Barack Obama the master of them all. He, not even a citizen of the United States, is intent on controlling the Internet, depriving Americans of their guns, killing the economy and so much more.

But take note that a Nevada Republican running for Congress blames both the Democratic and Republican parties for moving the country toward "socialist tyranny." An equal opportunity accuser!

Therein lies a clue.

I would not, with Mr. Barstow, characterize the tea party movement as an expression of "conservative populist discontent." Populist, probably; discontent, surely. But not conservative.

Both Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, and William F. Buckley, his modern, if imperfect, reincarnation, would shudder in their graves to see the tea partiers given the respectable label of "conservative."

Conservatism is a rational position. Paranoia is neither rational nor a position. It is, the dictionary informs us, a derangement, derived from Greek words that translate as "outside the mind."

History teaches us that we've been here before. History teaches us that fear-mongering can cause great annoyance, injury, turmoil, even death. But history also teaches us that paranoia in American politics, in the end, does not prevail.

This too shall pass.

Rudolph H. Weingartner is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as provost from 1987 to 1989 (rudywein@ comcast.net).