The Ladies Tea Party - Road to the Middle Class

IT WAS ENCOURAGING this week to see conservative women leading in the Tea Party movement. In Orlando on March 21 the 4,000 strong tea party was organized by two friends, Lisa Feroli and Shelly Ferguson.

But the menu at tea was the regular guy stuff: guns and taxes.

There’s nothing wrong with guns and taxes and porkulus. The Democrats are wrong on guns and taxes and as they are on most other things. But the real battle is yet to come. The problem is not taxes or even the gigantic inauguration present the Democrats gave themselves using our money. The problem is one trillion dollars a year in government pensions, one trillion dollars a year in government health care, and nearly one trillion dollars a year in government education: the vast web of compulsory health programs, education programs, and welfare programs. This year, every year. As always usgovernmentspending.com tells the awful truth.

The narrative is that these programs meet the urgent needs of women: health care to help people who hurt, education to enliven the minds of our children, and compassionate relief to those in need.

We conservatives know that there is something horribly wrong with the welfare state. We oppose it for a variety of reasons. Perhaps we oppose it because know that you cannot have self-respect unless you do for yourself. Perhaps we hate the suffocating liberalism-with-everything. Perhaps we revolt at the anti-family ethos that comes with every government program. Perhaps it is because we “must have freedom” and know that you do not have freedom when you get your mess of pottage from the patronage of a politician.

But then there are the moderate women. They just live their lives accepting what the liberal welfare state serves up. They may not like the dishes on the menu. Somehow the offerings at the neighborhood school don’t suit restless Brandon. “They” really ought to have a program that suits his kinetic personality.

Liberal women, of course, are merely practicing their religion as they ecstatically receive the sacraments of government health care, government education that are funded by our tithes. Though we should not bully them to abandon the faith of their mothers, although it would not hurt them to travel north from Sonoma, CA, to the ranch of socialist writer Jack London. In his flamboyant letter resigning from the Socialist Workers Party over 90 years ago in 1916 he wrote:

[L]iberty, freedom, and independence are royal things that cannot be presented to, nor thrust upon, races or classes. If races and classes cannot rise up and by their strength of brain and brawn wrest from the world liberty, freedom, and independence, they never in time can come to these royal possessions . . . and if such royal things are kindly presented to them by superior individuals, on silver platters, they will know not what to do with them, will fail to make use of them, and will be what they have always been in the past inferior races and inferior classes.

Well, it’s been a while since anyone on the left wrote like that. Probably it’s the effect on “superior individuals” of three generations of power, privilege, and sinecure.

Against the weight of faith and power and privilege our conservative tea party ladies are beginning a national conversation that come in its time to teach the liberal church ladies, as Voltaire once taught an earlier generation, to Remember the Cruelties—of a health care that does not care, an education that dumbs our children down, and a welfare system that destroys the fabric of human community.

Women want health care that cares about people. Health care cannot care while it operates as a vast government program in which politicians vie with special interests to distribute patronage to their supporters. How do we get from here to a system in which women can genuinely obtain the care they need for those they love?

Women want education that responds to the special needs of their children. Education cannot respond to special needs of children as a government program to service the education producer interests: teachers, administrators, book publishers, contractors, investment bankers, and the vast infrastructure of consultants and education experts. How do we get from here to a system that really cares about individual children instead of the latest fad of the education experts?

Women want welfare that helps people who are hurting, people in need. Welfare cannot do that while President Obama and the Reid-Pelosi Congress continue to roll back the most successful government reform of our lifetimes, the Republican reform of welfare signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Of course, conservatives have some rather good ideas on health care, on education, and on welfare. They are not perfect, but they are a start.

Our tea party ladies are meeting to build a new movement. Their tea parties are a start, too.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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The Ladies' Tea Party

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