The New American Revolutionists

Radicalized

I'd like to offer a few impressions on the Tea Party-sponsored Congressional Candidates' Forum that I moderated on Monday night—along with some observations about the implications this has for the prospective results of this year's congressional elections.

First, I would like to thank TIA Daily reader and Northern New Jersey Tea Party organizer Mark Kalinowski for brining a bunch of New Jersey Tea Party groups together to host this event.

This forum was a little different from the previous debates I've moderated, in that the candidates on the panel were not running against each other. They were a collection of Republican candidates from different districts across the state, selected because their candidacies were of particular interest to the Tea Party groups. In several cases, these are Tea Party-allied insurgent candidates who are running against an "establishment" Republican in a contested primary.

The fact that the candidates weren't competitors—and were in fact ideological allies—gave a pleasant, collegial mood to the forum. And I think it also made the forum more lively and interesting. When you have a debate with all eight candidates for one seat, you will tend to have a few candidates who are very sharp and interesting to listen to, a few candidates who are middling, and a few who just don't belong in the race. But on Monday night, the overall quality level of the candidates was pretty high.

As to the content of the candidates' answers, I'll start with the part that was most personally gratifying to me. In every event I've moderated, I've asked the candidates to name "the moral, political, or economic thinker who was been most influential on your view of the proper role of government." I've gotten some interesting, revealing responses to that question before, and some revealingly unrevealing answers. (You can tell the candidates who are searching for the "safe" answer when they latch onto "Reagan.") On Monday night, for the first time, I got the response I've really been fishing for.

The second candidate to respond, Roland Straten from New Jersey's eighth district, launched into an extended discussion about how he read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged many years ago, how it had a profound impact on him, how she predicted so many of the events that are happening today, and how everyone should read the book—all of which received a strong round of applause from the audience, more applause than could be accounted for by the six Objectivists that I know were in attendance. The Atlas recommendation was seconded by the 12th district's David Corsi. As someone who shares that positive evaluation of Atlas Shrugged—and then some—I was thrilled to see it recommended twice.

Other responses included the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (from the third district's Justin Murphy). The Ancient Roman statesman Marcus Cicero also came up for the second time. (The first time was from Mike McPadden, a candidate in Virginia's fifth district.) I finally figured out that this is the influence of Glenn Beck, who has been recommending an old conservative book, The Five Thousand Year Leap, a kind of intellectual history of freedom which apparently features Cicero as an important early advocate of political liberty. Other candidates cited Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the Founding Fathers generally.

These answers set the tone for the evening, which generally confirmed my sense that the right has been "radicalized" by the events of the past 18 months.

In all of these debates, the whole point of my questions has been to get the candidates to move beyond the usual bland bromides about "small government" and low taxes that we have typically gotten from Republican candidates who then go on to vote for the expansion of Medicare and for trillion-dollar bailouts. So my point has been to prod the candidates to state exactly what programs they're willing to cut, what functions of government they think are illegitimate, and how far they're willing to go. What has surprised me, at all of these events, is how little prodding the candidates need.

Here are some of the things on which there was broad agreement Monday night: privatization of Social Security (David Corsi described it as a Ponzi scheme); abolition of the Department of Education (viewed not just as wasteful spending but as a federal takeover of the schools); abolition of the Department of Energy; de-funding of the EPA—not just to prevent them from imposing controls on carbon dioxide, but a general de-funding of the whole agency. Corsi, the most radical of the candidates, added that we should abolish the Federal Reserve and return to a gold standard. And no one seemed eager to leap to the Fed's defense.

Naturally, I got all of the candidates to pledge to repeal ObamaCare, but I went one step further. I got them to commit to a one-sentence repeal, i.e., "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is hereby repealed." That's as opposed to some kind of partial repeal of reform of ObamaCare. And I got them promise to vote against "cap-and-trade," and to hold congressional hearings on Climategate.

When it came to cutting government spending, the bidding began at a 20% reduction—an easy target, as the 9th district's Michael Agosta pointed out, because it could be accomplished by returning to spending levels from a mere two years ago, before the TARP bailout. Roland Straten set the highest target: a reduction of federal spending by 50%.

Apparently, this is not the year of the bland, safe "centrist" candidate.

That said, there were a few points where I had to sit quietly and grind my teeth—the price of being the moderator of a discussion rather than a participant. Most of the candidates made some appeal to raucous anti-immigration sentiment, which got a disturbingly enthusiastic response from the Tea Party audience. And my impression is that these candidates were somewhat more religious, on average, than those in previous forums. I was particularly torn about the sixth district's Anna Little. She was one of the most passionate and principled candidates, with a very appealing personality—she's a real firecracker. But when I asked about what priority the "social agenda" of the religious right should have relative to the issue of free markets and small government, she was the only candidate who insisted that Republicans should place equal emphasis on both.

Just as revealing was a new question I added for this event. All of the Republican candidates have been talking about how they're in favor of upholding the Constitution, so I decided to throw them a curveball. I reminded them that we can amend the Constitution, then asked what amendment they would propose. In return, I got a suggestion for a balanced budget amendment and for the repeal of the 16th Amendment (which authorizes the income tax). But I also got a suggestion (I can't remember from whom) to make English the country's official language—a bit of pandering to the anti-immigration crowd. And Anna Little proposed a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception.

I also had to hold my tongue a bit at all the praise being heaped on the "FairTax," the tendentious name for the idea of replacing the federal income tax with a national sales tax. But at least on this issue, we had a bit of a debate. I very much agreed with Roland Straten when he replied that our problem is not how we're collected taxes, but how much we're collecting—and that we have to dramatically cut federal spending before we even begin to talk about taxes. (Straten was not the most articulate or charismatic of the candidates, but when he got going he had some really terrific moments.) I believe it was the seventh district's Lon Hosford—who advocates a flat tax, if I recall correctly—who pointed out the risk of getting a national sales tax, only to have the income tax return. He pointed to the example of New Jersey, which instituted an income tax supposedly in order to reduce the state's property taxes. Instead, New Jersey now has some of the country's highest income tax rates and the highest property taxes.

But with some of my reservations stated, overall I am heartened by the radicalization that I've been seeing on the political right. A lot of the candidates out there are real fire-breathing pro-free-marketers.

Admittedly, my sample could be biased. The two Virginia debates were in relatively conservative districts, and Monday night's event was specifically for Tea Party-backed candidates, rather than those backed by the Republican establishment. But then again, those two Virginia districts currently have Democratic incumbents, and Monday night's Tea Party candidates are from a usually Democrat-leaning "blue state."

I also have to admit that many of the candidates I like best are long-shots. But in this year, I wouldn't count any of them out. I'll have much more to say in Wednesday's edition about the results of today's primaries, but it is clear that radical candidates are coming out of nowhere and winning races, while incumbents and establishment candidates are dropping like flies.

So if my sample is at all representative—and I think it is—there are a very large number of radicalized pro-free-marketers running this year. And I suspect that a substantial number of them will actually get elected. There was a little bit of joking among the candidates Monday night about forming a Tea Party Caucus in the next Congress. But that's no joke; it is precisely what we might get. All we need is a core of a dozen—who knows, maybe two dozen—congressmen who embrace these radical proposals, who would then attract and influence others, who would become radicalized by their example.

And that makes me optimistic that we really could have an effective pro-free-market congressional majority in Washington next year. It fills me with a sense of—what are the words I'm looking for? Oh yeah, "hope" and "change."—RWT

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Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal"