By: Anthony Knolls

Boingboing.net, the well-known online group blog, recently came out with a story about the hypocrisy of Ayn Rand, the fabled hero of the Tea Party. In the article, called ‘Ayn Rand Took Government Assistance While Decrying Others Who Did the Same’, Mark Frauenfelder details the exposure of Rand’s apparent insincerity with a rather reliable source, Evva Pryror—the social worker who surreptitiously secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments under the assumed name Ann O’Connor (which isn’t that much of a pseudonym when considering that her husband’s name was Frank O’Connor). For those of you who are wondering why Rand using government assistance to pay for treatments for her lung cancer is such a big deal, then I merely point you in the direction to the philosophy that Rand created to fit her skewed vision of the world: Objectivism.

While there are many other outdated philosophies that atrociously attempt to define the world and fail because the theories are burdened down by the philosophers’/critical thinkers’ off-colored perceptions, or are perhaps too subjective—which there is such a thing—since they fail to recognize the application of their philosophy in the real world beyond their own individual experience, Objectivism is probably the worse due to its adoption by a growing faction of American politicians with the Tea Party.

Since the inception of the Tea Party movement in late 2007, the protestors and members of the party have continually bastardized and misquoted the thoughts and theories of the Founding Fathers and other less capable thinkers, like Ayn Rand. And while Frauenfelder’s ad homonym argument in his article only validates the hypocrisy that a majority of people knew already about Ayn Rand, it does seem to neglect any sort of thesis or argument within it. And while the facts of Rand surreptitiously acquiring federal aid while proselytizing quite vocally about self-interest and a laissez-faire government is possibly one big-ol’ posthumous embarrassment, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what this means.

To move beyond Rand for a minute, let’s consider the political party and the people thereof who take Rand’s ideas and philosophy to heart. The fact that the Tea Party has the audacity to even consider themselves “dissenters” and representative of the modern versions of America’s Founding Fathers, or even as America as a whole, is both an insult to this country and, I believe, to the spirit of the Founding Fathers. Their whole perpetuation of being a Populist movement, as this group for the “people” as opposed to the “elite”, not only is completely off-the-mark when considering who the Founding Fathers were, but is not even close to a supposedly originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

Here are some of the reasons why the Tea Party is a bit off their mark in a majority of what they say. For one, the Founding Fathers were the elite when considering what America was like pre-Revolution. While the colonies back then were the most egalitarian system in the world, both then and arguably now, that doesn’t mean that absolutely none of the stratification and patriarchy that existed in the ‘mother land’ England did not travel overseas with the colonists. The Founding Fathers were not excluded in their perceptions that mob rule, the most basic and rustic people of America (the Gaucherie of America, so to speak), would not sustain a viable country for very long. To go further back in history, since many of the Founding Fathers were reading and taking to heart this particular text and it speaks to much of their motivations, one must understand some of the basic principles laid out in Livy’s History of Rome.

There were a few principles that the Founding Fathers extracted directly from the pages of Livy and pasted straight onto the Constitution. Namely was the principle of individual, private sacrifice for the interest and continuation of the public good. If one were to read as an ‘originalist’ interpreter of the Constitution, then the Tea Party, right off the bat, would be wrong. The reason for this sacrifice that Jefferson, Hamilton, and others saw fit to include within the framework of this new government, a republican movement, which hadn’t been a feasible framework in about two thousand years, was because in Livy many of the books are filled with disputes and fights breaking out between the plebeians and the elite, especially about taxes—sound familiar? Yeah, this whole lowering of taxes and populism tenant is nothing new, not for the Founding Fathers and definitely not for the Tea Party.

Another principle is the disinterested leader, the impartial spectator, or the absolute virtuous man, depending upon which philosopher/political thinker’s thoughts you tend to lean towards. In other words, the Founding Fathers saw that to be involved with politics an individual must not have anything at stake within the economy, or market, otherwise, theoretically, that individual that has anything at stake in the policy making of the government would and could be susceptible to corruption be it subtle and soft or blatant and oppressive. The ideal person for the jobs on Capitol Hill were those that could objectively access what the people needed, the educated few that were able to comprehend that in order for any country to sustain itself needed to maintain a balance between private and public interest. Whether or not the past or current politicians in America have achieved such a feat is not in debate. What is in debate, though, is whether or not mob rule, or populism in any shape or form you want to spin it in, could ever rightly claim that self-interest is the best kind of interest and if the Tea Party is anywhere close to the mark of what the Founding Fathers represented.

But the core values that both Livy and the United States Constitution highlights is a continuation of responsible, civil discourse between politicians, especially, in regards to the States specifically, a dialogue between those who occupied each of the three branches and the citizens that they represent. In essence, both Livy and the Founding Fathers valued, above all else, political rhetoric that was neither vitriolic nor violent. Even looking at The Federalist Papers in comparison to The Anti-Federalist Papers you can see that the writers of each at least respected some form of civil discourse that, while representing the continual conflict and dichotomy within America, ultimately demonstrated that through debating in an educated manner we could achieve the best sort of government.

With that said, I move now to Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the rhetoric that surrounds that whole controversy (man, I’m all over the place). Many already know about this year’s shooting of the Congresswoman, and I don’t mean to garrulously repeat what’s already been covered. What I’d like to point out is March 25th, 2010, approximately ten months before Jerry Lee Loughner shot Rep. Giffords. For those of you who don’t remember what happened last March, it was the day that a whole bunch of politically motivated vandalism occurred against many left-wing politicians, including Rep. Giffords. She was even interviewed about the event in which she mentioned, eerily, the irresponsibility of Sarah Palin’s web site displaying that map of America with crosshairs hovering over different districts and representatives that they—as good Americans, I guess—had to “take out.” A year goes by and people forget, and the web site comes up again as a topic of interest, this time in a much more tragic context. But I never saw Sarah Palin culpable for what happened to Rep. Giffords. My main reason: Palin’s too much of an idiot to be anything other than a political pum and that by assigning blame onto her people we’re missing who was actually responsible even more so than the shooter; that of course, being the Tea Party.

In MSNBC’s coverage of the events that took place last March, you’ll notice those flash blurbs at the bottom of the screen. One of those flash blurbs stated: “AZ Tea Party Leader: Giffords is Toast,” while Giffords was being interviewed. I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty explicit in its meaning. And, in fact, many Tea Party members disliked Giffords and politicians of similar creeds because of their support of the recent Health Care Act and other presidential decisions. But why should they be able to threaten a representative?

Freedom of speech?

Does that really extend to eliciting violent rhetoric to promote their half-cocked political ideologies? I would not be surprised if every single person who signed the Constitution would be absolutely appalled at the Tea Party’s rhetoric. You might say, ‘But why does this matter?’ Because rhetoric, especially that in which constitutes as media coverage, is responsible for framing our world and thus ultimately determines the way in which we think and see a certain topic.

Now I’m not saying that Loughner heard a Tea Party member or Sarah Palin, heard some subliminal message in their rhetoric and decided that shooting Giffords was just the ‘right thing to do’. But I am trying to indicate that the Tea Party and similar groups and political factions played a role in shaping the consciousness of how people like Loughner thought about the world. I’m talking about indirect responsibility on the part of the Tea Party, not direct. And like the Boingboing.net article exposing the hypocrisy of Rand’s ideology in practice (to her own life), it should be recognized that the Tea Party (in all its many, many faults) is just as hypocritical as its matriarchal ideologist. Self-interest without any checks-and-balances or social morality that allows individuals to do as they please, as was the case 2,000 years ago, 200 hundred years ago, and about a month ago, leads to destruction, chaos, and violence.

Thoughts?