What exactly does the Tea Party movement want? Other than bringing three-cornered hats, powdered wigs and knee breeches back in style, that is.
If every Republican squish in Congress were booted out of office and replaced by a doughty defender of our constitutional freedoms, what kind of laws would this purer, more authentically conservative GOP pass, and which government programs would it dismantle? If FDR gave us the New Deal and LBJ gave us the Great Society, how would President Rand Paul or President Ted Cruz seek to transform American life?
No one really knows. But it is a question that comes to mind after the shocking defeat of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.
One reason it is challenging to describe Teatopia is that Republicans who identify with the Tea Party movement are diverse in their ideological inclinations. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., is an idiosyncratic libertarian in the Ron Paul mold, and he has never met a U.S. military intervention he's liked. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a modernizing reformer type who wants to make government smaller and smarter, and he's a flag-waving believer in a Pax Americana foreign policy. Some Tea Party conservatives favor limiting immigration, including Dave Brat, the economist who vaulted to fame by besting Cantor. Others, including the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, believe that welcoming immigrants of all shapes, sizes and skill levels is a bedrock principle of Americanism.
Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible. In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government and state government over the federal government.
Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance and generous funding for mass transit. They might even have their own immigration policies, which would be more welcoming toward immigrants than the policies the country as a whole would accept.
More conservative states, meanwhile, would compete to go furthest and fastest in abandoning industrial-era government. Traditional urban school districts would become charter districts, in which district officials would provide limited oversight while autonomous networks of charter schools would make the decisions about how schools are run day-to-day. Parents would be given K-12 spending accounts, which could be spent on the services provided by local public schools and on a range of other educational services, from online tutoring to apprenticeships designed to provide young people with marketable skills.
On transportation, Teatopia would borrow from governments in Australia and New Zealand, where roads are owned and operated by public road enterprises that make spending and investment decisions on the basis of consumer demand rather than political imperatives. Social welfare policies would be crafted with local sensibilities in mind, and they'd have a different character in communitarian Utah than they would in libertarian Texas.
