Monday, August 5, 2013

The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart: The Tea Party is Nativist, and Only Selectively Libertarian

The Tea Party

Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast contends that the contemporary Tea Party is not a thoroughly libertarian movement that seeks to guard and maximize the liberties of all.  To the contrary, he argues, the Tea Party is a more consistently nativist movement with little concern for how marginalized groups (e.g. Muslims, etc.) are treated by the state.

The column is linked below.

Peter Beinart: Tea Party Nativism

"We’ve seen this before. In the 1920s, many of the same “small-government” conservatives who denounced progressive-era taxation and regulation as an assault on personal freedom also supported Prohibition, which they considered necessary to keep Catholics and other recent immigrants from endangering America’s moral fiber. Throughout the civil-rights era, segregationists accused tyrants in Washington of denying the people of the South the freedom to do as they pleased. Their definition of “people of the South” just didn’t include blacks."
---Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast 


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