First Principles

I just got home from Reno’s Tea Party, and it was great fun.  What better way to spend America’s Birthday than to talk and think and debate and celebrate the founding ideas of the United States!

There was certainly anger in evidence, and rightfully so.  But that was a small undercurrent in what (to my great relief) was a great wave of celebratory mood.  It feels damn good to stand up with a hundreds of other people who can also see the Emperor is naked, and to say it out loud with them.  That, and just to enjoy a beautiful day with some great people.

The main organization was largely the work of my friend Debbie Landis, who has done yeoman’s work in putting these events together in Northern Nevada, spending thousands of her own dollars to get things going.  It was emceed (I’m new to protests – who knew they had emcees?) by “Todd Taxpayer” of LowerNevadaTaxes.com, who shepherded through a fascinating array of speakers.

They came from pretty much anywhere and everywhere, and some were great and some were more forgettable.  I didn’t agree with all of them on everything.  But the striking thing to me was how thoughtful people’s comments were.  They were philosophical in content.  They were making assertions, and then making a case for it.

There was a lot of honking. A LOT. But I suspect most of it was from other people unwittingly paying more houses than their own.

It’s sad that this should shock me.  But I’ve been on enough college campuses, and lived in Seattle long enough, to have a justifiable expectation.  Most speakers at a lefty rally shout a bunch of bumper sticker slogans about Bush being a war criminal, or that everything is racist, etc. – the talking points are so predictable and so absurd and accepted so totally without any thought process behind them.  (My favorite was the cheering when some hippies were literally throwing excrement at a large plywood drawing of Bush, Cheney, Karl Rove, and John Ashcroft, followed by a tank running over the Statue of Liberty.)  There was very little of that today, which made me both proud and relieved.

There was as much scolding, if not more, for Republicans as there was for Democrats, despite the attempt by the paper to turn this into a partisan event by trumpeting the voting registration of the event sponsor at every opportunity.  The general gist was that we expect this kind of madness from the Dems, but that the Republicans betrayed the people there who had worked so hard to support them in the past, and that was much worse.  It hard to argue with that.

The crowd itself was friendly and diverse.  A lot of Republican things I’ve been to are pretty old, but there were a lot of younger people running around here.  That’s either doom for the GOP here (and elsewhere) in favor of another party, or a grand opportunity if they can capitalize on it.  The Libertarians were far more of a presence than the Republicans, I have to say.

The handsomest and humblest speaker at the Tea Party

I got up on the stage and pimped the blog a little bit, but I hadn’t asked in advance and so didn’t get up until the end.  I talked about Washington State’s state owned liquor stores and their problems with booze distribution and the fact that you can’t have justice without liberty – the lack of booze, of course, being the ultimate injustice.  In all seriousness, though, if the government can’t get peach vodka to a bar all summer, why would any sane person want them in charge of health care?

The local paper has thus far refused to guess at the number of people who were there, only offering that there were “hundreds.”  (At least they avoided the term “teabaggers” this time – per se evidence in my mind of being another kind of bag.  So I guess it’s an improvement.) Todd Taxpayer said that he was told 2,000 people were there, which I have to say seems kind of high to me.  I tried to count by counting up the people in a small people and extrapolating, but that was still the rawest of guesswork.  But there were at the very least 1,000.  There were a lot of jokes in the crowd, anticipating the loving media coverage, about how there were clearly only 50 people or so.

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One of the best parts of these is the creativity and cleverness of the signs people are waiving around.  Here’s a sampling:

What is this "earning" thing? I thought all wealth was just luck of the draw, and if I had less than someone else, that was a "social injustice!"

Well, it’s easy to halve a deficit if your first budget is quadruple the previous record holder.  Sometimes you don’t even have to lie to tell a lie!  Silly dog.

This is the great thing about this protest.  When liberals take to the streets, they want something from the government.  They’re demanding more of other people’s money.  What gives this movement more power than the average lefty rabble rousing, I think, is that people are taking to the streets to demand less “help”.  We don’t want other people’s money – we’d just like to hang on to a lot more of our own.  We can help ourselves perfectly well, thank you.

There were a lot of "Atlas Shrugged" references - signs that said, "Who is John Galt?" and "Ayn Rand was Right".

I don't think they'd take them.

This hat seems to be missing some embroidery... Or maybe not. My father-in-law did the same thing to his.

There were a ton of veterans upset with their government.  I wonder if Susan Sarandon has sent any of them letters for being brave in their dissent, like she did for Iraq war deserters?

You mean free people, left alone, will power an economy forward? Central economic planning doesn't work? One of my favorites of the day, and sums up nicely what these events are all about.

So What Now?

None of this will mean anything unless it turns into votes and ultimately, better policy.  Stomping around in a parking lot will ultimately do very little to save our economy and our principles.  The left had plenty of angst and outrage, but they couldn’t really accomplish anything with it until they got a candidate they could all get excited about.

Let’s hope we have some folks waiting in the wings in the very near future, and/or some current Republicans who start to understand conservatism and who can articulate our founding (and successful!) principles.  Well, let’s do more than hope.  Let’s find them, cultivate them, support them, and get them into office.  Until we do, things aren’t going to get any better – and the longer we wait, the harder it will be to recover.

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For more Nevada Tea Party action, check out the rundown from yesterday’s in Las Vegas from the Cranky Hermit.

Update: Instalaunch!  Thanks, Professor Reynolds.  It’s great reading that post, and seeing this happening all over the country.