Oh The Hypocrisy!

The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform…

A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people’s backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

A few weeks ago, NPR did a fawning profile of Keli Carender, aka “Liberty Belle,” one of the founders of the tea party movement. Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog digged into “Liberty Belle’s” background, and came up with some interesting tidbits:

Carender is an actress and improv comic — here she is in the cast of her sixth show for Seattle’s Wing-It Productions. And, gosh, what’s this? Why, it’s a list of arts grants issued by Washington State in 2009 — including $3,750 to Wing-It Productions! In order to fund that, Washington State had to take from some people in order to give to the other people!
But Carender’s never asked about that — or about the National Science Foundation-funded research project she worked on in 2000.

So, two anecdotes, which doesn’t amount to data. For that, try Bloomberg’s new poll (HT: TPM):

More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level.
At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

They also look to the government to rein in Wall Street, with almost half saying the government should do something about executive bonuses. Supporters are also conflicted over whether private-enterprise elements should be introduced into government programs like Social Security and Medicare.

As an aside, watch for that euphemism for privatization, “private-enterprise entitlements” — it’s a new one to me.

Anyway, this all goes to illustrate a point I’ve made many times before: A central rule of the American political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract — and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes — but they really, really like living in a society with good, fully-funded services. They like what government does in the specific, even if they have an inherent suspicion of the idea of “big government” (the phrase itself was coined to counter liberal attacks on “big business”). That’s the reason the Right can’t argue honestly for its preferred policies. They can win votes by shouting about “government tyranny,” but when they try to mess with a program like Social Security, or cut the budgets that put cops on the beat, firemen into shiny red trucks or offer health-care to children or the elderly, they get clobbered.

They understand this very well, which helps explain their completely unhinged freak-out over a decidedly centrist approach to HCR.