The new polarities

For most of my life the political polls have been between liberals and conservatives. In the last few years the traditional political axis has shifted. Liberals are gone, replaced by progressives. The opposition to the progressives is still in flux but it is lead by the Tea Party movement and the Reagan Republicans.

It is easier to define the progressive movement since it has a defined leader, Barrack Obama, as well as a set of historic goals. The core belief of the progressives is that they can solve all of humanity's problems through government intervention. I have described them previously as thinking of themselves as the smartest people who ever lived. They are not anti-business but they want business strictly controlled. If you examine the relationship between the Obama administration and Wall Street, this becomes obvious. Their planned expansion of health care also follows this model. They will not replace big business in the form of the insurance companies but they will make them into a public utility under heavy regulation.

Progressives are not in favor of general expansion of government, just the executive portion. Obama is no believer in the separation of powers. The Supreme Court issued a ruling he disagreed with so he misrepresented it in his State of the Union speech and called on Congress to overturn the Supreme Court. When Congress failed to pass his commission on balancing the budget he simply created it anyway as an executive order. There was no legislation enabling him to take over GM and Chrysler. He simply did it. The law that created the TARP said that money returned will be used to repay the Treasury. Obama has proposed alternate uses for this without going to Congress.

This is in keeping with the progressive movement. They have always been in favor of taking government out of the hands of amateurs and turning it over to the professionals. On the local level this consisted of taking power away from mayors and city councils and giving it to city managers. On the state and federal levels it involved creating sprawling departments that turn out reams of regulations that have the force of law. Obama has proposed expanding the reach of these departments.

Even that is not enough for some progressives. Columnist Thomas Friedman has written about how much better the Chinese government works since it only has a single party with no checks and balances. If the Chinese government decides to do something, it does it.

The movement opposing the progressives is disorganized but it has some important central issues. The biggest one is that government has already grown too big and expensive. They would like to see the government live within its means. They see Obama's stimulus as nothing but patronage on an unprecedented scale and they worry about Obama's talk of redistributing wealth.

Glenn Beck has had a great influence on this movement as has Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism. Beck used this a starting point and started researching the progressive movement from the early 20th century. To Beck's surprise, the progressive movement had the same roots as communism and fascism.

This should come as no surprise. The goal of progressives is to centralize power into the government. Communism and fascism are what happen when the government has unlimited power. I do not believe that the Obama administration intends anything like this but remember the old maxim about power corrupting. Also, keep in mind how much corruption exists in the government today. Neither party has distinguished itself as paragons of virtue in the last few years. Democrats came to power promising to improve transparency and eliminate the influence of lobbyists. Ask yourself, how much power can these people be trusted with?

The opposition has many problems. Early on the Tea Party organizers decided on a big tent approach. This attracted a variety of anti-government groups. Some of them are hard right. Some of them had been anti-Bush - for example, anti-Patriot Act groups. They share a common distrust of big government but disagree on all sorts of particulars. This also makes it easy for the progressives to criticize the Tea Parties. They can point to the radical fringe and insist that it characterizes the entire movement.

One thing that puzzles progressives is the Tea Party movement's attitude to George W. Bush. They assume that the Tea Partiers are an off-shoot of the Republicans and ask why they object to Obama policies that are continuations of the Bush administration. The answer is subtle. First, Obama promised to be different from Bush. When you disagree with one party you can vote for the other. When you disagree with both parties then you take to the street. Second part of this is that the Tea Party is separate from the Republicans. Republican leaders hope to capitalize on the Tea Parties but it is an uphill battle. The Tea Partiers have not forgotten that John McCain supported CO2 caps and campaign finance reform - both expansions of government.

One paradox is how disunited the opposition to the progressives is. The Libertarians should be the natural allies of the Tea Party. They both promote smaller government and both are heavily inspired by Ayn Rand. This is not enough. The Libertarians look down their noses at the Tea Party. An editor of Reason Magazine, writing about the Tea Party convention, said that he would not vote for Sarah Palin if a gun was at his head.

Regardless, this reflects new political realities. The Netroots are trying to dump Democrats who are not progressives and the Tea Partiers have declared war on big government Republicans.