Tampa Tea Party’s fear of socialism is unwarranted
April 16, 2009 at 6:36 am by Ben Luongo
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
I wanted to follow up on my last piece which was on the tea party protests, so I attended Tampa’s tea party at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. I previously wrote that the debate on Obama’s spending has suffered from the failure of both sides to provide reasons for their arguments. I therefore attended the event with the hopes of understanding some of the tea-partiers’ reasons for their concerns.
Here is what we talked about:
I talked with two campaigners with Campaign for Liberty, which was one of the organizations managing the event. “The infiltration of government money into the economy is not the answer,” said one of the campaigners. Their reason was that this type of spending leads to increased government and puts America on a path to socialism.
Socialism was a major theme at this event. There were several speakers, all of which shared their concerns about socialism. Organizations passed out pamphlets on securing America’s economic prosperity. Protesters carried signs that accused Obama of being a socialist, communist or collectivist.
There was a second theme in the event — the American Constitution. This, too, was a major point in speeches, pamphlets, and protestor signs, although it wasn’t clear to me as to how this event was relating these two themes. I spoke with George Schwappach, an organizer with the Tampa Tea Party Group. He gave an intelligent explanation that the Constitution was designed around the idea of federalism and limited government. He said that this type of spending is in conflict with the ideals of the constitution, and, according to how it is written, “Obama may not even be allowed to do this [stimulus plan].”
Relating the two ideas, there was a general overall concern that the move towards socialism didn’t only undermine America’s economic prosperity, but it also undermined the American Constitution, which by extension would be a threat to individualism. However, these arguments equating Obama’s spending to socialism and collectivism are baseless because they suffer from a misunderstanding of what socialism really is, as well as Obama’s intentions.
Increasing regulation or government spending does not move a democratic society closer to socialism. Democracy and socialism are two very different ideas and cannot conceptually merge closer to the other. Democratic societies place the individual at the center of society; the state allows free individuals to pursue his or her own interests, unleashing each person’s particular skills where everybody practices what they excel at and therefore benefits from what others excel at. Socialism, on the other hand, emphasizes the whole, where it regulates social activity to ensure the well-being of society.
So these are two very different ideas — democracy and the individual vs. socialism and society as a whole. Here is where the confusion comes in. People label Obama’s spending as a move towards socialism because they think it resembles the regulation of social activity that we find in socialism. However, democratic societies also need government intervention and regulation in order to safeguard and uphold the individual at the center of society. If a democratic society goes completely unregulated, then free social activity and economic prosperity might collapse into itself, which is what we saw with banks practicing absolute freedom to hand out irresponsible loans at the expense of the economy. Therefore, even free societies need to borrow the idea of regulation in order prevent breakdown. In other words, a democratic society may regulate social activity so that it can protect and maximize the individual’s capacity to act in that society, which is what Obama’s plan is geared towards doing.
I seriously doubt that President Obama has a socialist agenda in store for America, but I do think that he understands that protecting individualism sometimes calls for regulation and intervention. His spending, while you may disagree with how he’s spending, is designed to recover the American economy, not socialize it.
