Change

The Tea Party wants to return to the good old days. If they mean the days when Glenn Beck wasn't on air, invite us to the party.

In the latest installment (as of 1 September 2010) of The Conversation, where New York Times columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins quip online about recent issues or events between their more serious and critical columns, Brooks admits that he not only attended the Glenn Beck Tea Party Rally in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous I Have a Dream speech, but that he also actually had a good time. We at the Pub thought the most pertinent part of the discussion came when Collins gave her assessment of the anger in the Tea Party movement:

Here’s my thought for the day. The Tea Party people say they’re angry about socialism, but maybe they’re really angry about capitalism. If there’s a sense of being looked down upon, it’s that sense of failure that’s built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers. Capitalism is also a system that lives off of change. When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Is Collins right? If she is, and if you think you are old enough to have seen shifts in your pieces of America, what is different about it? What was it like when you grew up, and what is it like now?  Does the American experiment, in even its darkest corners–or does capitalism, in its even darker alleyways–really inherently foster that much change? Or do you side with the following David Brooks answer, that “God and Mammon are intertwined?”

I guess I’d put it this way. Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control. The Germans have a Christian Democratic set of institutions, enforced by law. The Swedes have their egalitarianism. Since the days of Jonathan Edwards, we have developed a quasi-religious spirituality that informally restrains the excesses of the market. God and Mammon are intertwined. Many people feel that the values side of this arrangement is dissolving. Both the government and Wall Street are leaping into the void, to bad effect.

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