Doug Casey on the Tea Party Movement

Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

L: So, Doug, I forgot to ask last time, now that we have you back from the new spa you tried in Thailand, how was it?

Doug: This spa was different from the ones I recommended in our conversation on health. Purely detox oriented, with very interesting results that aren't relevant to discuss here, except to say that I think the U.S. as a whole is headed for an uncontrolled, unmonitored, unprecedented, probably unavoidable, and most unpleasant detox experience.

Along these lines, consider what seems to be brewing in the Tea Party movement. It's just a straw in the wind, of no real significance itself, but a foreshadowing of something ominous. All the false hope this Tea Party movement is creating impresses me as similar to what was going on in France in the late 1780s…

L: I think I can guess, but why do you say that? As much as you dislike the government, isn't it a good thing that so many people are finally fed up with it and at long last are showing signs of willingness to throw the bums out?

Doug: Well, you know I don't like making predictions, so I'm not prepared to say that it's a terrible thing, but it's at least a double-edged sword. Of course it's nice to see that there are people out there who are unhappy with the status quo, with the so-called two-party system, and with the Republican party in particular. But the process of "throwing the bums out" has gone on since Day One, and it's accomplished absolutely nothing. The system itself has degraded hugely. And more than ever before, government draws the absolute worst type of people and totally corrupts those who might be decent. That's because government is so overwhelmingly powerful today.

L: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But why the Republicans in particular? Isn't the stupid party as bad as the evil party?

Doug: As you know, I've always distinguished them this way: the Democrats definitely don't believe in economic freedom, but they say they believe in social freedom, while the Republicans definitely don't believe in social freedom, but they say they believe in economic freedom. Neither believes in both – that would make them libertarians.

L: [Chuckles] So, it's what they lie about that really distinguishes them. Or, more to the point, it's not what they believe, or say they believe, that drives them, but what they don't believe. Not what they value, but what they fear. It's not love but hate that is the guiding principle of American politics.

Doug: Exactly. Like most of what we see in politics, it's completely perverse. The only good thing about the Democratic party is that they're at least consistent: they are collectivists and statists through and through. They are collectivists in what they say, and they are collectivists in what they do. That gives them the appearance of being more honest than the Republicans.

L: They may be crypto-communists draped in red, white, and blue, but at least they're consistent?

Doug: Yes, but not the Republicans. They say they value freedom and the individual, but their actions give lie to those claims, and they give freedom a bad name. It makes you reluctant to use words like "free market," when you have the likes of the hostile and mildly demented McCain, and the bent and clinically stupid Bush claiming those principles for what they do.

L: Makes me mad. It adds insult to injury that Ronald Reagan got elected on essentially libertarian rhetoric – smaller government, lower taxes, getting the state off the little guy's back, etc., and the signed appropriations bills that saw government grow by huge, then-unprecedented amounts. Many people today think the Reagan years prove that less government is a bad idea!

Doug:  Remember what the Reagan team used to say, "If not us, who? And if not now, when?" As it turned out, it wasn't them and it wasn't then. The worst enemies of individual liberty are knaves that claim they're for it but utterly betray it. And incompetents and ineffectual fools who say they're trying to save freedom by increasing the size of the state.

L: Alas for Bartleby the scrivener. Okay, so back to the Tea Party, a sort of rebellion on the right, could this not push the center of debate in the right direction? A little?

Doug: It might, just as buying a $1 lottery ticket might make someone a zillionaire. The French Revolution also probably seemed like a good idea at the time, if only because it wanted to overthrow a totally corrupt ancien régime.

The problem with the Tea Party movement is that it has no underlying philosophical basis. Without that sound foundation, it's either going to fail or transform into something really ugly. On average, Tea Party members know something is wrong. They're disgruntled, and they want change. Not the Obama type of change – but what? You just don't know which direction they may go, and there are some very disturbing directions they could end up taking.

L: Such as?

Doug: They tend to be thoughtless and reflexive. They conflate some muddled feelings of "tradition" with an actual belief system. They operate on a stimulus-response basis. They're religious in exactly the same way as fundamentalist Muslims. And they're hypernationalistic.

"My country, right or wrong." "Support our troops." That sounds good, until you realize they're just a bunch of  heavily armed kids who are blindly doing what they're told in some fly-blown place they can't even find on a map. The Germans supported their troops when they invaded Poland. "Us" against "them."  Wave the flag. That sort of thing. It's like a gigantic replay of the Milgram experiment. It's just another dramatization of collectivism and jingoism.

L: The one that really gets me, and not just from Americans but from people all around the world, is: "My country, right or wrong!" That means you're willing to support what you know is wrong. It's pathological.

Doug: And a complete abnegation of individual responsibility. It's almost a Pavlovian stimulus-response type of reaction, more appropriate to chimpanzees around a watering hole than rational humans who can think things out for themselves.

The very strong, atavistic, religious streak to Tea Party types is a related danger. Glenn Beck is one of their standard-bearers. He's always admonishing people to do things because God wants them to. That's potentially very problematical – which god? Yahweh? Allah? Probably not Thor or Baal – but maybe it's Jesus. What would Jesus do if he were in the CIA in Afghanistan? What does Glenn Beck think the Holy Ghost would advise? So many people claim to know what their gods want everyone to do, and if a god commands you to do something, I suppose you have no choice in the matter.  But they can't all be right.

L: Unless you happen to be Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Then you have a phone on your desk that gives you a direct line to God. Like the Bat Phone in Commissioner Gordon's office. It lights up when God calls. Beep, beep, beep…

Doug: Or like that other guy… was it Oral Roberts who said he'd had a vision of an 800-foot-tall Jesus who said that if someone didn't give him $8 million, he was going to die? There's very little difference in the mindset of the average Christian and the average Muslim. Each side sees the other as dangerous, fanatical, and misguided – and they can both be right about that. Things haven't changed much since the days of the Crusades.

L: I remember hearing about Roberts – but there were so many TV-preacher scandals. And to heap insult upon injury, Jesus himself reserved some of his harshest words for hypocrites. To engage in the hypocrisy of preying on your own flock, in his name, is about as low as you can go.

Doug: I should make clear here that I'm not trying to make fun of religion, per se. I understand that when people are looking for some type of spiritual reality, they are hoping to find something that makes their lives more meaningful than a dog's, or a chimpanzee's…  and that's laudable. But parroting some demagogue's aberrant thoughts or blindly following words written in a book don't impress me as paths to enlightenment.

I'm not trying to invalidate any person's beliefs. I'm simply trying to get them to take individual responsibility and not fall into group-think.

L: Like Mark Twain or Robert Heinlein, it's not religion itself I've got a problem with but the big churches, which are human organizations run by fallible human beings, that I often have a lot of problems with.

Doug: Yes. I'm well known for being an atheist, but I'm actually quite sympathetic to looking for spiritual truth; there's no conflict whatsoever there. I'm all for it – I just haven't found any proof for any religion that I can accept, and I don't accept things just because "it's been written," nor because everybody else does. I don't want to delude myself. Just because something may sound comforting doesn't mean it's true.

But that's all a digression. The point is that it's not just religion but a willingness to use the state to impose religious values on society that I'm afraid is a big element in the Tea Party movement. It can be fine for people to have personal values derived from their religions, but these people are coming together to look for political solutions to every real and imagined problem facing America today.

The fact that they are looking for political solutions to these problems is, itself, a formula for disaster. If they are successful, they will pass laws. And maybe, accidentally, some of those laws might do some good—

L: [laughs]