The NY Times' story this week on FreedomWorks' "boot-camp" training of tea party organizers -- "Shaping Tea Party Passion into Campaign Force" -- left me adrift, again, in the unknown waters of tea party ... policies?
Shaping the tea party's passion into a "campaign force" I got; it was the passion itself that somehow fled the story. Passion for what?
I don't mean extracting some strategically ambiguous reply -- Less government! Less taxes! -- from the interviewed FreedomWorks apparatchiks and attending tea partiers. What others would like to know the answer to is, How much less? What departments and agencies should be eliminated? How much would be saved? What are the offsetting costs to society of the savings? What, in FreedomWorks' alternative free-market society, would take the place of those amputated departments and agencies which were once created out of grossly conspicuous need?; that is, who in the free market would step in to do the unprofitable work of, say, hunger, or education, or protecting as opposed to exploiting the environment?
We learned none of this. It may be that FreedomWorks' "boot-camp" drill sergeants weren't saying, or were being unquotably coy about it all. If that was the case, the Times should have told us. Instead, we learned that FreedomWorks "has done more than any other organization to build the Tea Party movement"; that "For 18 months, the groupβs young staff has been conducting training sessions ... across the country, in hotel conference rooms or basements of bars"; and -- this sort of thing is invaluable only if one knows absolutely nothing about campaign rudiments -- that "Through its political action committee, FreedomWorks plans to spend $10 million on the midterm elections, on campaign paraphernalia ... [and] voter lists, and a phone system that allows volunteers to make calls for candidates around the country from their home computers."
What of policy, though? The word did erupt once: "This movement, if we can turn out hundreds or thousands to the streets to protest and wave signs and yell and make an impact on public policy debate," said FreedomWorks' top organizer to the attending pious, "then we can make a lot of difference." So we know they wish to "make an impact on public policy"; we just don't know what policies, or why, or how.
Taking pity, I guess, on adrift readers such as myself, the Times did pause about midway in the piece to inform us that FreedomWorks "want[s] to build a like-minded community, an endeavor that is as much fun as work," which read as though the Times was quoting from a FreedomWorks real-estate brochure. But don't get the idea they are merely an admixture of playful laborers, for, continued the Times -- Bring up the angels! -- "they are also deeply ideological."
OK, now we're getting somewhere, I thought. How deep? This deep: "a portrait of Ayn Rand hangs on the office walls along with one of Jerry Garcia."
Assuming that that in-depth reporting might not clarify your every fogginess, the Times elaborated: "FreedomWorks was founded to promote the theories of the Austrian economic school, which argues that economic models are useless because they cannot account for all the variables of human behavior, and that markets must be unfettered to succeed."
And other economists say ... what? Which economic models? Are Keynes', for example, really "useless"? Do other economists actually claim they can "account for all the variables of human behavior"? Are "fettered" capitalists suffering unsuccessfully today?
You likely would have asked such questions, and I might have asked such questions. But the Times didn't. Or if it did, it didn't bother reporting the answers.
So, what's the precise goal -- that is, the intended, ultimate policy goals -- of FreedomWorks' training program, which is but a practical means to an ideological end? After reading the Times story, that's still a mystery. The tea partiers and their sponsoring parent remain a cipher of negativity and subtraction -- Less government! Less taxes! -- but little else, which of course is the mystery that preserves its attraction.