The Enlightened Values of the Tea Party

~ Clarissa

I can never figure out if the journalists who publish in The New York Times are serious or sarcastic. Here is an example:

At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others.

Republicans and Tea Partiers as defenders of Enlightened values would make sense as part of a comedy routine. However, I’m not seeing huge respect for individual rights in the Republican Big Brother policies of extreme state intrusion into every aspect of citizens’ lives, including their internal organs and their beds.

As somebody who specializes on the Enlightenment, I fail to see even a minimal overlap between the Enlightened philosophy of the XVIIIth century and anything whatsoever in the Republican platform. Enlightened thinkers, for instance, lived and died for the separation between church and state. The entire era of the Enlightenment is one enormous attempt at liberating human beings from the shackles of religion. 

What a stupid newspaper, seriously.

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Published by Clarissa

47 thoughts on “The Enlightened Values of the Tea Party”

  1. It’s like the Bible. Fundamentalists choose and pick a la carte what is the inerrant word of God, while Tea Partiers pick which parts of Enlightenment thinking they like.

    Was I wrong in my interpretation of the Wikipedia page of Rousseau?
    Seriously all of these sound very Tea Partyish:
    -Antipathy towards the idea of a representative democracy and a preference for an oligarchy of a minority of citizens.
    –The idea that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to mankind because they arose from pride and vanity.
    – The complete exclusion of women from the philosophical world view except as adjuncts of their men because men can’t control their boners.

    The Deism and the separation between church and state is easily ignored.

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    1. Feminism is the product of the Enlightenment. Enlightened thinkers wrote endless treatises in defense of the rights of women. The American constitution, the representative democracy, the concept of human rights all came out of the Enlightenment. The American constitution is the culmination of the era.

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      1. I’m not actually disagreeing.

        Again, they pick and choose which thinkers and ideas from the Enlightenment they like and narrowly interpret the rest.
        I don’t think for example, many Tea Partiers who claim to like the Enlightenment cite Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham or Condorcet.
        I also suspect they would downplay as much as possible the role of many women in hosting these salons.

        Plus a lot of Tea Partiers like Federalists, and Federalists like to pretend that it’s 1789. The Constitution at the time excluded anybody who wasn’t a white land owning property owner from franchise. So the internal organs and beds of people who aren’t them do not figure in their conception of liberty.

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    2. The thing is that there are a lot of people involved in the Enlightenment — it isn’t like a party platform. I can’t stand Rousseau & need more background on the primitivism, etc., but my understanding is that he can be thought of as a minor, not major Enlightenment thinker. ?

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      1. For Rousseau, the main thing was his extreme admiration of the indigenous civilizations of the New World. The weird post by Fatal Feminist that we discussed recently was very inspired by Rousseau ‘s school of thought. The indigenous peoples existed in the state of perfect bliss until the evil Westerners came and fucked it all up. That’s Rousseau. I’m obviously not a fan but this is still a pretty popular way of thinking.

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      2. To clarissa: Is this a more balance attitude:

        “The term ‘boy soldier’ is so often bandied about by the PC brigade in Black Africa. One’s heart goes out to them, though some of the atrocities committed by the very same tend to spoil the sympathy a little bit…. Never mentioned by the hypocrites typing out their sob-stories are our own generation’s boy soldiers, – some officially classified as such, like my fellow-recruit Gavin Chilcott in the RLI in the beginning of 1974.”

        Cf.

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  2. Well young lady, in better times, with better people – women like yourself often found employment working on your backs. In your case where personal appearance forbids such work – such women were put to task in cheaper brothels and saloons cleaning chamber pots and spittoons. Today you pose as intellectuals.

    Good grief. In an age of true enlightenment – when enlightenment is only a mouse click away – you actively seek the council and comment of other idiots. I will say one thing for leftists – they certainly know how to treat their useful idiots. You lefties are building that monster, Clarissa, and it will be the height of comedy to see you destroyed by it.

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    3. Glenfilthie, you have the mindset of an illiterate serf from the 13th century. The money spent on your education would be in a much better place flushed down in a toilet. You should be deported back by a time machine to the 13th century where your hyperprimitive privilege-worshipping pseudovalues belong. You are the reason why China will rise above the United States in maximum 20 years. Prepare your filthy mouth, Glenfilthie, because when this really funny time comes your kind will learn to beg for the cleaning job in those “cheaper brothels and saloons” which you already know so well.

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    4. Kid, it’s good that your command of the English language is good enough to allow you the most basic of rhetorical effects. You’re still mostly talking to yourself here, so I advise a diary. Thinking less about leftists, whores and charwomen and more about yourself will improve the world.

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  4. Poor Rousseau! He’s gotten such a bad rap over the past few days around here. I’m not an expert on him or anything but I think he was inspiring in some senses.

    I think the notion of the social contract is brilliant. He was very against monarchy as a political system. And he really was instrumental in helping to establish that education is beneficial to the individual and to society as a whole.

    Over course he had problematic views too. I certainly am not a Rousseau apologist. But I don’t think we need to be completely down on Monsieur Rousseau. 😉

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    2. The fantasy of a social contract may be the worst thing about Rousseau. It gives little trolls the notion that they can come up to me and say, “I piss on your idea of honor, but you still have to engage with me,, because we have a social contract.”

      I have obligations in the abstract? Really? In relation to those who do not disguise their hostility toward my ideas and feelings?

      Through the process of maturity I seem to have debunked such a crude formulation.

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        1. I just had his sudden insight overnight because of something this would-be troll said. It seems to encapsulate something about Rousseau and — if I may go so far — about the modern personality.

          They seem to think that by being childishly idealistic and harsh, they reach the height of their beings. Its very spiritually middle-class and perhaps we can know who is very middle of the middle by how much they implicitly subscribe to this notion. To try to clarity this, when they criticise others by “being harsh” they feel they are expressing the nebulous core that is the real them — their “childish idealism”, if you will. It’s nebulous and they don’t know why they are criticising, but it comes from a feeling, “I just don’t like this. I wanted something more or something different from what I seem to have received in life.” After they have this feeling, they stroke a blow against something, something “out there”, by being harsh. Maybe its the way the McDonald’s service attendant hands you your burger or maybe something else that can be determined to have fallen short of your expected standards. In any case, you express your childish idealism by being harsh.

          And after that (which marks you as spiritual middle-class) you feel that is all that can be known about the matter. You feel triumphant — as if you have justified yourself as a childish idealist in the world. They may have an excuse as to why the burger was presented to you poorly, but you’re not falling for that, because your childish idealism comes first. And harshness is its guarantor.

          Honestly, without a troll to inform me about such things that normally make so little sense to me, how would I understand the contemporary world?

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    3. I agree. The Rousseau – phobia on this blog has been disturbing. Let’s remember that Rousseau was one of the people who participated in creating the concept of a child. Which in turn eventually led to the creation of the Declaration of the rights of children that is so dear to my heart. And for that, many things can be forgiven.

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      1. We may just be giving a name to things we observe. Well, I am anyway. Nietzsche has this tendency, too, to give a name to social phenomena, which might not do justice to the actual thinker, but it is a way of encapusating something sharply.

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  6. “This little insect doesn’t have a mind. There is nothing to disturb.”

    b g was talking to glenfilthie, of course. Remember, bg is the vermin who made the ‘Michael brown is a thug’ comment on the day the grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson. Stupid little troll who admires other stupid little trolls.

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    1. Michael Brown was a thug. He strong armed robbed from a convenience store, assaulting the owner. Then he punched a cop and tried to take his firearm. Your feelings do not change facts.

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      1. I think word thug has replaced the word “n—–” in the American lexicon. It is used in the same way: to deman, dehumanize, and justify atrocity.

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      2. “Then he punched a cop and tried to take his firearm.”

        You believe this without question. But your feelings do not make this the reality. For example, investigators never tested Darren Wilson’s gun for Michael Brown’s fingerprints. You’d think this would be a key piece of evidence to look for, given Wilson’s testimony that Brown tried to grab his gun from him. But no fingerprint test. Other files from the jury reveal that Wilson was the one who put his gun in an evidence bag and also washed his hands before investigators could document blood/DNA on them (again, not typical in an investigation, as officers are not supposed to bag their own evidence or alter anything of their appearance before investigators can collect evidence).

        So no, not everyone unquestioningly believes Darren Wilson’s testimony or accepts the way the investigation was conducted. But you are free to believe as you wish.

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        1. ““Then he punched a cop and tried to take his firearm.””

          – It would be great if we all got a chance to witness that discussion at an actual trial. Barring that, we don’t know what the hell happened.

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      3. hkatz

        I don’t know that there would be fingerprints on the hammer of an automatic. But there is evidence that two shots were fired inside the cop’s car. As for bagging his pistol and washing up, he had never been trained in what he should do or not do after a homicide. I believe that he was in shock, I certainly would have been.

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      4. “I don’t know that there would be fingerprints on the hammer of an automatic.”

        This is something that could have been questioned in a trial. And I’m talking about any part of the gun suggesting that it was being wrestled away from Wilson. To not look for this at all is a major oversight.

        As for being in shock – he was in contact with other officers immediately afterwards who should have guided the investigation and walked him through it and bagged and collected evidence themselves. People involved in a criminal incident are often in a state of emotional disturbance, but that doesn’t stop them from being investigated. He wasn’t the only officer around who could have handled the evidence.

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      5. Thug, shmug, this is all hysteria. There is no capital punishment for “thuggery” whatever that is. And in cases where capital punishment exists, nobody can assign themselves the role of executioner.

        Be that as it may, do you have some sort of a problem with me and my friends standing outside in silence for 4,5 minutes? Does that somehow disturb you? What is it that you are trying to express here? Your disagreement with our right to peacefully congregate?

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      6. hkatz

        Wilson testified that he tried to shoot the gun several times but it didn’t fire. He assumed that Michael had stopped the hammer from firing. He also testified the Michael was trying to get his finger in the trigger and that at one point his gun was being aimed at his own thigh. So you are correct, there might have been fingerprints when he was twisting the gun.

        There was no extra personnel, Wilson drove himself back to the police station. If there were extra people, the sergeant on site wouldn’t have told Wilson to drive alone when in shock.

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      8. “There was no extra personnel, Wilson drove himself back to the police station.”

        I meant the officers who then showed up to the scene and, eventually, the forensic personnel who showed up (including the guy who didn’t take photos because he said the batteries ran out on the camera…). It wasn’t as if Wilson went solo for hours with no one knowing about this shooting; other cops knew immediately. He should not have left the crime scene alone or handled his own evidence; that’s not typically how an investigation gets conducted.

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        1. ““There was no extra personnel, Wilson drove himself back to the police station.”

          – I didn’t know this. Seriously??? The situation was even more egregious than I thought.

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        2. (including the guy who didn’t take photos because he said the batteries ran out on the camera…).

          – It’s truly admirable how efficient and productive everybody is in that police department.

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      9. “– It’s truly admirable how efficient and productive everybody is in that police department.”

        This is one of the reasons the case needed to go to trial. Albeit with a prosecutor who would act like a prosecutor and poke holes in the investigation and Wilson’s testimony (and of course a defense team who would also question evidence and witness testimony). The way the investigation was conducted and the approach the prosecutor took during the grand jury proceedings are a sad joke.

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