by On the Mirror of Justice blog, Michael Perry posts an essay by Michael Walzer entitled “How Passover Could Cure Us of the Tea Party.” (Perry’s own heading suggests that “Lent” might serve a similar function.) Walzer’s essay is for the most part an eloquent and edifying reflection on how Passover is a time to remember that we once were slaves in Egypt or, in more contemporary terms, that we or our ancestors were once immigrants, laborers, or factory workers. He proposes that it would be a good thing “if we gathered once every year and ceremonially remembered our working class past– the tiredness, the sweat, the bent backs, the hungry children.” That proposal is then immediately followed, without even a paragraph break, by this conclusion: “I am sure it would be harder to attend a tea party.”
I confess that I am baffled by this last sentence, which seems to me an utter non sequitur. I’ve tried to discern the implicit logic that connects this conclusion (and Walzer’s title) with the rest of the essay, and I can barely imagine a few possibilities, but none of them seems at all plausible (to me anyway). Yet Walzer is obviously a very smart person, and to him, it appears, the connection is not only real but sufficiently obvious that it requires no explanation.
The performance seems to me a small but vivid manifestation of a serious cultural chasm. And there is irony here, because it seems highly likely that tea party participants are much closer to the working class people Walzer urges us to emphathize with than, say, Harvard professors are. But be that as it may, what assumptions must Walzer have about tea party people, and what political assumptions must seem to him not only correct but virtually axiomatic, for this essay to make sense? Can anyone enlighten me?
I suspect Walzer’s assumption (and the one he thinks everyone else will make) is that Passover is a communitarian event and Tea Parties are individualist events. Passover celebrates our connections with one another; Tea Partiers resist connections with one another. Walzer here seems to assume that there is only one community—the mega-community. People are either for community (the mega-community) or against it. Because tea partiers resist state-imposed responsibilities to the broader community, they are not interested in what Bob Ackerman and I (in our book Law and Community) refer to as “intermediate communities”—families, religious congregations, and other smaller communities; they would not be interested in celebrating intermediate community relations. Walzer’s assumption—if this is his assumption—in my view, is wrong. I suspect that Tea Partiers may be more strongly committed to intermediate communities than are many folks who favor greater government-mandated care for the mega-community.
Walzer may be assuming that those who share warm relationships in an intermediate community (e.g., at Passover) are more likely to want to build relationships outside of their communities. In Toqueville’s phrase, intermediate communities are “little schools for citizenship.” In this respect, Walzer is probably right, but I think he is wrong in assuming that good citizenship will necessarily lead to advocacy of a larger state. It may lead to a stronger commitment within intermediate communities to address social problems through charitable activities.
Thanks, Bob. Your explanation could be right; it’s as good as anything I came up with, though still not very satisfying. Assumptions that people hold to be so obvious that they don’t need saying are often more powerful in people’s lives and decisions, I suspect, than the things that people feel the need actually to assert and defend. I also suspect that Walzer is probably representative of lots of people who view the Tea Party phenomenon with alarm or disdain, and also that pro- and con- attitudes toward the Tea Party are probably reflective of a serious divide in the polity these days. That’s why I think it would be nice to know what actually underlies an essay like Walzer’s.
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