Why do academics overwhelmingly reject the Tea Party?

This column was first published on October 18, 2010 at Washington Square News.

Tea Partiers are crazy. That’s been a pretty common element of liberal dogma over the last 18 months as the Tea Party has grown to have significant influence on the American right. It’s also an easy way to explain the apparent lack of Tea Party support among highly educated people, particularly those in academia. 

However, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, disagrees. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he argues that the problem with highly educated people is that they are not sufficiently educated.

Berkowitz claims education in political science and philosophy has focused too much on quantitative methods and abstract thought experiments. Political science in particular has developed a heavy emphasis on quantitative analysis and game theory that didn’t exist in any significant form 60 years ago. Philosophers, Berkowitz claims, are more concerned with outlandish and contrived situations that boggle the mind than with pressing normative questions about society.

According to Berkowitz, this has distracted us from “the founding principles of American constitutional government.” He continues, “Such exercises may sharpen students’ ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.” These opaque canons (it is telling that the author never actually spells them out) apparently don’t escape Tea Partiers.

It makes one wonder what exactly these “founding principles” are; probably “limited government”, “individual liberty” and “separation of powers” are among them. Even if you accept every word that Berkowitz says about modern political education (which I don’t), is there any reason to believe Tea Partiers are better informed about the founding history of the U.S.?

The New York Times found that Tea Party members are actually better educated than the public at large, despite the presence of some serious cranks. If anything, they are members of the educated class Berkowitz claims lacks knowledge of our founding values. Even at law schools, where education in Constitutional principles abounds, and especially at top schools where it is taught well, Tea Partiers are few and far between. 

Could it just possibly be that academics reject the Tea Party philosophy because it simply does not make sense? Tea Partiers universally desire a smaller government that taxes and spends less. Yet according The New York Times, most “think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.” They support so-called “outsider” candidates, but campaign on millions of dollars of corporate money from rich elites they claim to despise. And despite their constant rants about America’s descent into socialism, a majority of Tea Partiers think their taxes are fair.

This is why the intellectual hubris of the Tea Party movement is so off-putting to the highly educated. Tea Partiers like to preach from a high horse of Constitutional principle, but they make no effort to integrate it into sound policy. Berkowitz claims that modern political education is only good for teaching us how to argue. More likely, it teaches us how to think.