The Government of the Cross Resurrected: The Rise of the Tea Party .

In his terrific article "Obama and the Rhetoric of Progressivism," Peter Berkowitz discusses the way in which John Rawls' concept of justice as fairness has been utilised by the progressives.

To be sure, Rawls asserts that "justice as equity is but one" ofthe many political conceptions of justice that deserve consideration in aliberal democracy.

But he makes no such concession about fairness,which he takes to get a unitary meaning, and which most people equatewith justice. Not merely by equating his favored creation of justicewith fairness itself, but also by demonstrating throughout hishalf-century career in academic philosophy a distinct lack of interest inother opinions about justice, Rawls powerfully signaled that theprogressive understanding of fairness was equivalent to justice itself.

A host of second- and third-generation Rawlsians - todayrepresenting a major, if not the leading, school within academicpolitical theory - developed a popular branch of the theory of justiceas fairness they frequently called "deliberative democracy." Its purpose isto apply Rawls's theory of judge to practice. Many variants have beenadvanced, and the advance has been extended to international law andinternational relations. Elements of it can be seen in the academicwritings of State Department Legal Counsel Harold Koh, who is formerDean of Yale Law School, and Director of the power of Policy Planningat the State Department Anne Marie Slaughter, former Dean of the WoodrowWilson School of World and External Affairs at PrincetonUniversity. All versions respond to a common problem, develop a commonsolution, and be a common conceit.

The professors' problem was that, as good progressives, they tookpride in their democratic bona fides. But the policies - on abortion,affirmative action, welfare, taxes, human rights, America'sresponsibilities abroad, and others - that they regarded as dictates ofjustice frequently failed to command majority support. And unlike Croly,today's progressives are reluctant to proclaim, at least in public,that "the ordinary American individual is morally and intellectuallyinadequate to a severe and consistent conception of hisresponsibilities as a democrat." The professors' solution to the paradox of progressivism - how toreconcile a professed loyalty to greater democracy with a powerfulconviction, in battle with the preferences of the people, that justicerequires more centralised government and more elite rule - built onRawls. Its intellectual roots can be traced to Rousseau's doctrine ofthe general will. The designation of the concept of justice with fairness is highly contestable.It is a perversion, in my opinion, of the classical theme of justice as "what one is owed."It presupposes a collectivist rather than an individualist concept of judge and of society.Its Rousseauian roots are green to all new forms of bolshevism and are reason enough to eliminate this conception of justice.But it is typical of progressivism that no argument is allowed at the essential point: the nature of the human soul and the kinship of man to society.Several aspects of contemporary politics become understandable when one understands progressivism in this manner.First, it explains the surface of the Tea Party. The Tea Party has come into existence almost entirely for the role of opposing progressivism and deposing from office the progressives who are stressful to re-make America in their image.If we see the Tea Party in this way, we will be lots more potential to see in what sense even its libertarian elements can be properly described as conservative.The Tea Party is materialistic in that it opposes Progressivism.Second, it explains the nature of the rhetorical attacks on the Tea Party by the Left.Why, one might ask, is a democratic movement devoted to participatory democracy regarded as being so dangerous by the governing elite?The answer is because the liberal elite is fundamentally anti-democratic in believing that the ordinary citizen simply does not recognize what is in his own best interest.The picture of Tea Partiers as racist, violent and bigoted is necessary because the progressives cannot but say what they actually think: that ordinary citizens are too dazed to live what is better for themselves. Third, it explains what the Tea Party really wants. To hear the progressives talk, one would mean that the Tea Party is essentially anarchistic and destructive of all forms of social cooperation.But their hyperbole at this point arises out of their sense of despair over the refusal of the people to let the elites decide what is better for them. The Tea Party stands for 3 things that the Progressives find abhorrent: (1) democracy as the least bad of all possible systems of governance, (2) limits on the office of the union authorities and (3) the condemnation that not all problems can be solved because of limitations inherent in human nature.The Tea Party, in short, rejects Utopianism and this is what truly drives progressives crazy. If one gets out of the echo chamber that is the mainstream (progressive-dominated) media long enough to judge the Tea Party as opposite to progressive politics, it looks much less waste and woolly.In fact, if you looking at it this way it really begins to see far more sober, grown-up and naturalistic than progressivism.