In the hours of confusion following the recent murders in Tucson, commentators speculated about the political sympathies of Jared Lee Loughner. Because Representative Giffords was the previous target of heated Tea Party rhetoric, many wondered whether the shooter was driven by anti-government sentiment. But the gunman proved to be an enigmatic thinker and many reported that his bizarre ramblings reflected no discernible politics.
Lost in the debate over what triggered Loughner’s actions is any meaningful defense of the vitriol that does exist. Maybe a better question to ask is what does this eruption of anti-government violence tell us about the purpose and value of the Tea Party’s particular brand of anti-government rhetoric? To answer this, it might be helpful to consider Loughner’s philosophy of government, not to establish responsibility or motive for the shooting but to consider the possible logic of the Tea Party’s political language.
Some objections to associating Loughner with the Tea Party appear to be his anti-religiosity and the idiosyncrasies of his thought. We can presume that Loughner, who is resolutely anti-Christian, would have little patience for Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck’s laments for lost Christian values. But their Christian Nation rhetoric is not new, and is certainly not exclusive to Tea Party thinking.
What does distinguish the Tea Party as a movement is a hyper-literal, ahistorical reading of the Constitution (what Paul Harvey has referred to in these pages as Constitutional Fundamentalism) that defends individual freedom against tyrannical government. The twist here is that tyranny is equated with progressive social reform. The focus on liberty and tyranny is so central that it’s often overridden religious concerns, as in the conservative admiration for the deeply anti-Christian Ayn Rand. There are precedents for this in American history as well, but the Tea Party represents uniquely high popular support for this program.
Inventing Your Own Reality
While I am speculating based on a few YouTube postings, and I expect that a more detailed assessment of Loughner’s delusions will emerge, both his constant invocation of the Constitution and his indictment of federalism (and its corruption of our money supply) do place him in line with this strain of Tea Party thought.
In consigning Loughner’s thought to a bizarre aberration, commentators have overlooked that his YouTube postings reveal what might be a vaguely intelligible personal philosophy. That is, he is concerned about fraud, especially with fraudulent misrepresentations of language and currency. To make his case, Loughner employs a series of syllogisms, such as in his description of his education at Pima Community College: “If I’m not receiving the purchase from a payment I’m a victim of fraud. I’m not receiving the purchase from a payment. Therefore, I’m a victim of fraud.” An example of his college’s fraudulence is its practice of teaching subjects like algebra without adding any value while still requiring payment (or the expenditure of tax dollars). As Loughner explains, algebra is free. Charging a student for an algebra class amounts to selling a free product and is a scam.
If the world worked properly, grammar and currency would convey real value without distortion. But because of government practices of mind control and currency fraud, they do not. As a way out of these misrepresentations, individuals need to learn to dream, a practice that he labels “conscience dreaming.” This dreaming promises both literacy in the form of a proper comprehension of English grammar (to resist government mind control) and the ability to coin a currency (to resist government money). But according to Loughner, fewer than five percent of people dream. His statement about the illiteracy of the people in Gifford’s congressional district has been read by some as a possible link to anti-immigrant activism. However, it seems that illiteracy characterizes anyone who accepts the pervasive faulty grammar and faulty logic that is controlling our minds.
Mirroring his theories of grammar, Loughner is convinced that currency in the form of gold and silver has real value independent of its use as a marker of exchange, and that the fraud he sees in our currency system is the same fraud that pervades all social, economic, and political institutions. Individuals should get no more or less out of their exchanges with other people than exactly what they purchase. To this end, he seeks to command his own private grammar and his own private currency. Anything less than complete autonomy is mind control.
In speculating about Loughner’s relationship to the current political climate, it’s important to remember that the Tea Party is not an internally coherent movement with a consistent political philosophy. Rather, it is unified by the proposition that individual freedom is always at odds with the public good. Not all members of the Tea Party are Birthers, Deathers, or Truthers, but advocates of these positions have found a congenial home in the hothouse of conspiratorial, paranoid theorizing that defends the individual liberty to invent one’s own reality.
While the details of Loughner’s views on currency and language might not have a following, they differ only in degree and not in kind from the autodidactic, eccentric musings of senatorial candidates who cite the unconstitutionality of unemployment insurance and minimum wage, who see in health care reform a plot to kill senior citizens, who propose the gold standard as a solution to the national debt, or who question the president’s birth certificate. If Loughner’s radical vision of individual autonomy is deranged and psychotic, it is a kind of derangement and psychosis that increasingly characterizes our political climate.
One practical feature of this suspicion of shared social life is that individual autonomy is protected by guns. While martial metaphors are employed for a variety of purposes across the political spectrum, what is distinct about Tea Party rhetoric is that it is tied to a decidedly non-metaphorical defense of armed insurrection against a tyrannical government (such as in Sharron Angle’s now-notorious reminder of the Constitutional right of the People to employ “Second Amendment remedies” should their freedoms be threatened).
The Second Amendment does far more than protect the right to draw targets on a map or to point a finger and say “Bang!” If, following Angle’s logic, it’s not meant merely to protect the rights of hunters or homeowners, or to encourage a reliance on citizen militias instead of a large standing army, but was instead intended by the framers to be a self-destruct mechanism to check an overreaching federal government, then what exactly is wrong with an individual exercising this liberty when he or she is indeed living under tyranny?
While it was uncharitable to say that Angle was calling for armed revolt in response to her own personal election defeat in 2010, she was defending the legal principle of the citizenry to arm themselves against a tyrannical government. But what, practically speaking, would the realization of this right actually look like? Would the Tea Party organize an armed revolt of individual gun owners in a lengthy and bloody campaign against the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines in order to overthrow the socialist tyranny in Washington and empower freedom loving Americans to repeal Obamacare? Not likely.
You Say You Want a Revolution
My point is not to conclude that the Tea Party caused the supermarket killing spree. The point is that whatever the causes of Loughner’s violence, it demonstrates the vacuity of the Tea Party’s revolutionary imagery. When confronted with actions that actually follow through on the literal logic of their rhetoric, Tea Party patriots counter that sane people should know they were obviously kidding. Problem is, for the Loughners of the world, words that signify nothing are fraudulent speech.
While I have no doubt that Palin did not intend her now-infamous crosshairs as literal instructions to shoot, she certainly won’t be accused of promoting Christian neighborliness and peaceableness with such symbolism. What we can conclude was that Palin’s map, like her politics, was neither a call to constructive action of any kind nor a proposal for any meaningful vision of freedom.
Palin’s, or Angle’s, or Beck’s defense is that they say lots of hyperbolic things for dramatic effect and people should know better than to take their words as actual guides for action. While this may be persuasive, it is a weak defense of one’s own political rhetoric. At best, then, Tea Party vitriol is bluster for the sake of bluster, a set of metaphorical remedies for metaphorical wounds that nevertheless amount to a real attack on any persons or political institutions that might conceivably seek to serve the public good.
*This essay has been revised since publication — ed.
