The tea baggers are, by inborn disposition, slaves. Aristotle understood that many people are born slaves, and though he may have applied that idea a bit irregularly, the initial insight was accurate. They are imbued with what Nietzsche calls “slave morality,” a will to slavish power that fears and despises the true freedom of those who exist comfortably with it. The tea baggers have done the only kind of slave revolt a true slave could be expected to do – a revolt to bring their condition to the rest of mankind and to prevent any possibility of liberation. Freedom is terror to this variety of homo sapiens and its existence for anyone but the master class is equally terrorizing. Of course, “slave” entails the need for “masters,” so the entire revolt is for the interest of expanding and ensuring the power of the masters.
Poor David Brooks. Over the years, I have seen a man of basic decency conflicted by the world of simple good-heartedness he believes is out there, and the world of so-called conservatism, which is essentially a war of the few against all. He travels into socio-biology to find factual grounding for his bland All-American Christian values, and twists the unrelenting facts thereof into a frame for his child-like desire for Ma and Pa and Apple Pie. The utterly true message this science gives us is that we are a species of slaves and masters. The moral quality of the masters is what counts, but that won’t be found in the GOP. This is the heart of the ideology of his beloved GOP: it is the party of hatred, xenophobia, and individual priorities of the most egocentric over the good of the greater society. The masters have coopted the party of Lincoln, and the slaves feel comfortable again now that they can relinquish the personal responsibility freedom imposes on them. The GOP has no moral base: they only utilize moral rhetoric for an Ayn Randian end: feed the parasites their pap and put them back where they belong: feeding off of each other while ignoring the actions of their betters . The word hypocrisy, which Jesus used so well in the Sermon on the Mount in his campaign against the Ayn Randians of his day, has lost all cachet in the modern age. It’s a useless invective, having meaning only to those who know what it is, a vanishingly rare breed. Moral opacity has no windows, no portals of light. Fact, the foundation of the virtue of honesty, is a useless balm for the powerless. David always seems so offended, so hurt on those rare occasions his eyelids stir above the pupil and he suddenly realizes that the eternal verities are no longer operational. What I see is someone who has the heart of a liberal who fights it with near Freudian unconscious pathological determination. Poor guy – maybe he will come over to the party that has always admired clear thinking and factual foundations. His rhetoric might be put to better purpose.
