Tea Partiers: Political Heirs of the Hippies

If you read only one political article this week, read this one:   The Electric Tea Party Acid Test.

The Tea Party is the one social movement in contemporary America that can rightfully claim to be the ideological heir to the original hippie movement that started in the mid-’60s.

Tea Partiers are the true heirs to the hippie ethos. ... The Tea Party and the hippie movement share four fundamental core values:

•   A craving for independence;
•   A celebration of individualism;
•   Joy in the freedom offered by self-sufficiency;
•   And an acceptance of the natural order of things.

Unlike most analyses, it accounts for a distinction more important than the familiar big government-versus-small government dichotomy:   people’s beliefs about human nature; the difference between those who think it's innate and unchangeable and those who think it's changeable:

Artificially constructed collectivist utopias require that human nature be altered for any new society to work, because elements of existing human nature — greed, jealousy, lust for power, a need for privacy, and so on — would render the system unfeasible.   So utopian collectivists necessarily believe that humans must be changed and can be changed (for the better, of course).   This may seem like a minor detail to the collectivist program, but actually it’s the main sticking point, one which the collectivists have never been able to solve (because, as any sane person knows, it’s unsolvable; human nature can’t be changed).   But that hasn’t stopped them from trying, again and again, with ever-increasing levels of coercion, to mold the human spirit into the desired shape.

Read carefully.   It will be on our final exam.