FrumForum interviews with Tea Party activists reveal an isolationist streak among the movement’s members.
With news emerging that a hypothetical Tea Party party would beat out the Republican Party in a three-way matchup, FrumForum sought to explore what a Tea Party party’s foreign policy platform might look like by interviewing Tea Party protestors during the Capitol Hill protests this past Tuesday.
While virtually all of the Tea Partiers interviewed by FrumForum expressed support for American troops overseas, their comments indicated that a Tea Party party foreign policy could very well be isolationist in nature.
“I think a tea party foreign policy would probably be none. A tea party foreign policy would be working on getting the U.S.A. back together… Our economy is in disarray. I don’t think this is a time to worry about foreign policy when our country is about to collapse. It’s time to take care of ourselves,” said Nate Wiggim, recently profiled in the Tea Party documentary.
“It was a foolish decision to go to Afghanistan in the first place… [while] our own country’s borders are left open,” continued Wiggim. “We have all this globalization. We don’t produce any of our own products, we always import everything. We need to focus on ourselves before we worry about any other country’s foreign issues.”
Others expressed concerns that a robust foreign policy that extended American power around the world might conflict with the Tea Party movement’s concern for rising government spending.
“When it comes to foreign policy… whatever policy is being developed needs to be fiscally responsible and isn’t going to burden the United States in debt,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, pointing out that while she wasn’t “necessarily opposed” to having troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was costing the government quite a lot of money to maintain a presence.
Jeffrey Johnson of Atlanta, Georgia also made a link between fiscal responsibility and the need to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan: “Under these harsh economic times, we need to pull back on our foreign spending, both from a military and financial aid standpoint… The troops should be withdrawn to reduce the financial tension on the United States. I would not have deployed troops to [either country]. We’re fighting something we can never win.”
Some of the protestors invoked Ron Paul’s non-interventionist approach in explaining their foreign policy stances. “At heart, I’m increasingly a Ron Paul guy on foreign policy. We can’t be the world’s policeman… Iraq and Afghanistan could be too much for us to handle. The people there have to stand up. It’s their country,” said John Tidwell of Bristol, Virginia.
As the tea party movement takes steps to translate their policy aspirations into political outcomes, conservatives should watch out for a new wave of Buchanan-esque isolationism. As these FF interviews indicate, support for the spreading of democracy in the world and even for free trade may wane as Tea Partiers either become more active in the GOP or start their own party.
AynRandsBabysDaddy // Dec 21, 2009 at 1:36 pm
BOOOM!!! Roasted. Well done, PCR. Well done indeed.
As for the rest of you, I’d just like to remind you that you shouldn’t assume that the Tea Baggers are all the same. As a matter of fact, it’s our rampant individualism that unites us. For instance, at all the rallies I’ve attended I’ve met maybe one or two people that were adamantly against the Afghanistan incursion from the very outset, like myself. But let’s not hold it against those who would learn from their mistakes. At the same time someone mentioned the “Tea Party” has no platform or foreign policy. This isn’t true, at least to me. I believe pulling out of all our foreign bases and redistributing those military resources in the domestic US would be a great policy. If anyone lives near a small military base you know all about the BRAC decisions that put entire communities at wit’s end every 3-4 years. Why are foreign bases never discussed when the military and Congress get together for Base Realignment and Closure? I’ve never understood conservatives that believe the federal government is naturally incompetent when dealing with domestic issues(it is) but for some reason is all-knowing and all-powerful when dealing with foreign issues. We don’t trust the government to provide American citizens with health care so why, by God, should we trust it to pacify Afghanistan? In any case my point is that me and my fellow Teabaggers probably have less in common than we have differences. But it’s what we have in common despite those differences that make us a force: Love of liberty, personal responsibility, and self-determination.
Captainchaos // Dec 21, 2009 at 8:40 pm
“I wonder, then, how you were led so far astray to have missed so completely the point of the American experiment. ”
The point of the “American experiment” as you put it, was to secure ordered, republican-style liberty for those of European descent.
I refer you to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
And to Jefferson:
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers.”
“Because all throughout history, from the conquest of Canaan to the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the machetes of Rwanda, racial identity has brought nothing but misery and death wherever it has gone.”
A racial “identity” is nothing but that of perceiving what one is. Racial/ethnic affinity is nothing but familial affinity extended. Any criticisms you would make of the affirmation of one’s racial/ethnic group is applicable to the affirmation of one’s family. Your ideological appointments render you incapable of interfacing with these issues in a way that is not, well, disturbingly consistent with Marxism. And your characterization for the love and loyalty one naturally and rightly has for his own is a anti-human travesty.
Captainchaos // Dec 21, 2009 at 11:06 pm
AynRandsBabysDaddy,
You have such a big target painted on your chest I just can’t resist taking a shot.
The words of Ayn Rand:
“The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) — the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) — the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law — the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history — all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.””
But then:
“The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.”
The words of Murray Rothbard:
“[T]he Randian movement was strictly hierarchical. At the top of the pyramid, of course, was Rand herself, the Ultimate Decider of all questions. Branden, her designated ‘intellectual heir,’ and the St. Paul of the movement, was Number 2. Third in rank was the top circle, the original disciples, those who had been converted before the publication of Atlas. Since they were converted by reading her previous novel, The Fountainhead, which had been published 1943, the top circle was designated in the movement as ‘the class of ‘43.’ But there was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: ‘the senior collective.’ . . . Strengthening the ties within the senior collective was the fact that each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Peikoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of ‘43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.”
You say: “As a matter of fact, it’s our rampant individualism that unites us.”
Well that ain’t much. Screw Ayn Rand.
No wonder advocacy for our peoplehood is frozen out of MSM via the tact of “dynamic silence,” as the affirmation of our peoplehood threatens powerful interests, and we win our arguments – every time.
Captainchaos // Dec 22, 2009 at 12:06 am
And since I’m at it, I just couldn’t resist shattering some of the other myths that allow the suggestible to be duped like so many sheep as they are reinforced with a false sense of moral superiority.
Contra the politically useful myth surrounding Churchill: Churchill was a dyed in the wool White supremacist, and above all a Anglo-Saxon supremacist who wanted to “keep England White.” Churchill only assented to the Morgenthau Plan for Germany’s deindustrialization (a plan that by some estimates would have resulted in the starvation of half of the German population) because arm was twisted at the prospect of being denied Lend-Lease if he did not so assent. The leakage of the existence of the Morgenthau Plan very well could have been responsible for the German people fighting on to the bitter end, and with that hanging over them, they had every right, every reason, and every duty to do so. It is true, Himmler’s SS perpetrated heinous crimes, but it is alleged by no mainstream historian that the German people were collectively implicated. Yet the German people were held collectively guilty. That is not a standard (the standard of collective guilt) I suspect some would wish to see applied across the board, as the massive disproportionate involvement of their group members in the crimes of Bolshevism are but an open secret.
What is more, Stalin well planned to invade Western Europe, and we can very reasonably surmise what the outcome of that would have been, the transformation of Western Europe into one giant Katyn mass grave. The decapitation of the genepools of peoples, that was the Bolshevik method, no? Yes. And their subsequent replacement by Stalin of their leadership class with that of ethnically alien commissars who would experience no pangs of loyalty to those peoples. You hear deny the call of the blood? Not even Stalin, despite his ostensible ideological appointments, bought that. In 1932-33 possibly as many as 10 million Ukrainians were slaughtered by under the watch of Kaganovitch and Yagoda (hint: these men were not Ukrainians, nor Russians). It was not uncommon for parents of small children to be driven past the point of human endurance as a result of the engineered famine, and in a fit of insanity, kill and eat their own children. This happened but a few hundred miles from Germany’s eastern border. Western Europe was only spared as the Wehrmacht stepped into the breach.
Our people have a right to exist, a right to the necessary conditions to sustain that existence, and a right to the truth about themselves. Those that would deny us that are self-evidently our enemies.
AynRandsBabysDaddy // Dec 22, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Quoting Rand to defend your rascism while ignoring any of my points about the Tea Party movement is, well…. I just feel like I paid $10 to go see Twilight in the theater. Complete waste of time reading all of that which was undoubtedly copied verbatim from Stormfront : ) The response reminds me of the website sexinchrist.com where some wacko uses all sorts of Holy Scripture to advocate anal sex, threesomes, etc. It’s laughable but just goes to show anyone with enough time on their hands and enough material can cherry pick and manipulate that material to satisfy their own intentions.
In any case, I’m not here to talk about the endangered species that is European Man. Good day to you, sir, and good luck with your race baiting
Captainchaos // Dec 22, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Let me get this straight, ARBD, you presumably (you know, given your pseudonymistic namesake) see Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” as being definitive normatively and descriptively (if you don’t understand what I mean by that, I’m not going to dumb it down, sorry). I contend, as I have shown with Rand’s own words, and with that of another libertarian who fleshes the actual historical dynamic of her movement, that Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and a liar. She bids us abandon our ethnic loyalty as she slips her own in the back door. Her inner circle were very nearly all her co-ethnics, that is simple too great a hypocrisy to be merely coincidental. Notice too the authoritarian, guruistic way in which she held sway over her followers, again, quite a striking contradiction from what one would expect a “libertarian” would conduct themselves, but that is not really the larger point; the larger point is this: it is a pattern which has manifested itself again, and again, and again in secular ‘intellectual’ and political movements in whom that particular ethnic group has been the driving and defining force. It is a recapitulation of the essential dynamic between a Rabbi and his followers, the only difference being the objects of their messianic drives are transposed to the secular realm.
But back to the point of the first sentence of the preceding paragraph (and I’ll put it in all caps so as to increase it not going beneath your attention – notice I say attention, having no hopes that you will ‘understand’): IF THE PARADIGM WITH WHICH YOU ANALYSE DATA IS FAULTY (in this case “libertarianism”) THEN YOU WILL NOT ANALYSE SAID DATA ACCURATLY! Your paradigm is flawed, so your “analysis” of the “Tea Parties” is also flawed.
I mean, it has been pointed out, and with accuracy, that the “Tea Parties” are LILLY WHITE. And THAT IS REALLY WHAT HAS PEOPLE FREAKED OUT. However, in your ‘mental’ punyverse, all that is just a COINCIDENCE.
Captainchaos // Dec 22, 2009 at 7:17 pm
I suppose the bottom line is that if those who seem to have the ineluctable compulsion to critique their European-derived majority societies, and to promote ethnic diversity, and to promote compolilitanized deracination within those societies, for their self perceived ethnic interests will not, or are indeed genetically incapable of not, responding with absolute reciprocity to the support European peoples grant Israel, then it is time for a divorce. What precisely is the role those of non-European descent should have in telling us just what we ought to do with our own people? No role at all. Reciprocity not forthcoming, then they can STFU.
Newbigtech // Jan 18, 2010 at 6:19 pm
If your own house is not in order, how can you help others?
First take the thorn from your own eye.
This country is in economic collapse. The borders are open and free to cross for every terrorist willing to pay the 500.00 to a coyote to get them to Phoenix.
The Mexican cartels waltz into Tucson and Phoenix wearing official police uniforms, hold up drop houses and kill innocent people……. and what does this administration do?
They investigate the only person in Law enforcement that has the guts to do his job in Arizona….
PEOPLE .. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?