Is the Tea Party Against Our Oversea's Empire?

Libertarian Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com makes the case that many leading Tea Partyers are libertarians at heart and therefore actually open to making significant cuts in our defense establishment, out of a principled stand that we can no longer afford our world-wide military empire any longer. I hope that's true and not just wishful thinking on his part.  If it is true, then I'm with the Tea Party too.

Beating Swords into Plowshares

If the Democrats’ mantra is all about spending, the Republican party line is all about not spending – and there’s no reason why military spending ought to be off the table. As Mark Meckler, a national Tea Party coordinator, put it:

“I have yet to hear anyone say, ‘We can’t touch defense spending,’ or any other issue… Any tea partier who says something else lacks integrity.”

To hear Phillip Dennis, founder of the Dallas Tea Party and a member of the Board of Directors of the Leadership Tea Party, tell it, Pentagon spending must be “constrained and reduced.” Rand Paul vows to go after “waste” in the defense budget, and wants to ban all lobbying by firms, including defense firms, that have over $1 million in government contracts. However, Chuck DeVore, a member of the California Assembly, and the tea party favorite in the California’s GOP senatorial primary, says going after fraud and waste isn’t enough, making the trenchant point that it’s just a rhetorical device to avoid specifics. For the hard stuff, we have to go to a recent piece in Politico linking the tea party’s fiscal conservatism to support for proposed defense cuts. The article cites Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican and “tea party favorite,” going beyond opposition to alleged waste and fraud, and criticizing the underlying foreign policy that calls for massive “defense” spending:

“’Most of these people want to look at all federal spending and put it all on the table. They want to spend on strong defense, they want to support our troops, but they want to get rid of all the fluff, the fraud, the abuse, the waste in the federal government. They want to see the federal government shrink in size.’

“Broun, a bitter critic of Obama — and no fan of Gates or the history of U.S. military intervention since World War II, including NATO — said the country ‘cannot be a protector of the whole world. We cannot do that any longer. We don’t have the money to do it anyway.’”

Who isn’t against waste, fraud, and cronyism? Even the cronies themselves say they’re against it. But running a more tightly-budgeted, efficient empire isn’t going to solve the problem, which is that imperialism is a luxury we just can’t afford anymore.

As the tea partiers move toward anti-interventionism, by the sheer logic of their position on spending, and the Obama cult moves rightward on foreign policy issues, making Obama’s wars the signature events of his presidency, what we are witnessing is the beginning of a fundamental realignment in American politics. A very liberal Democrat sits in the White House, directing two wars and ushering in a third, while conservatives are rediscovering their historical roots as skeptics of American power to shape events overseas.