The current Economist asks, “What makes Tea Partiers tick?” and answers with an explanation by Jonathan Haidt, a trailblazer in the scientific study of the psychology of moral sensibility. It is the suspension of karma.
Karma is not an exclusively Hindu idea, he states. It combines the universal human desire that moral accounts should be balanced with a belief that, somehow or other, they will be balanced. In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done.
Jonathan Haidt goes on to argue that, as conservatives see it, since the New Deal, liberals in power have been trying to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgement. Birth control and abortion detached sex from its natural consequences, welfare rewarded indolence and illegitimacy, and so on.
“Now jump ahead to today’s ongoing financial and economic crisis,” Jonathan Haidt continues.
“Again, those guilty of corruption and irresponsibility have escaped the consequences of their wrongdoing, rescued first by President Bush and then by President Obama. Bailouts and bonuses sent unimaginable sums of the taxpayers’ money to the very people who brought calamity upon the rest of us. Where is punishment for the wicked?
“Not only are sinners saved from their just desserts, in the karmic conservative’s scheme, the virtuous and true are punished for their industry through unjustly burdensome levels of taxation and bureaucratic interference. Studies show liberals are more likely to treat equality as a moral baseline, and to see wealth and poverty as lucky or unlucky draws in the cosmic lottery. For them, the state acts well when it intervenes to smooth the unequal wages of fortune. However, Jonathan Haidt contends, ‘For the tea partiers, federal activism has become a moral insult. They believe that, over time, the government has made a concerted effort to subvert the law of karma.’”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
As I recall it, the central purpose of the bailouts was to insulate the “virtuous and true” from the inevitable injury which had come or would otherwise have come to them as a result of the actions of the corrupt and irresponsible. Unfortunately, the latter also made out like bandits in some cases, although relatively ineffectual efforts have been made to limit their participation in the bailout windfall.
On the whole, I prefer another explanation as to “What makes Tea Partiers Tick?” Looks to me like a catastrophic failure in their faculties involving critical thinking.
Once you make the Calvinist assumption that we as individuals must be responsible for our actions and apply it with scrupulous consistency, critical thinking will lead you inexorably to the assumption that the interventional state, during the recent meltdown, effectively protected guilty individuals from the consequences of their action, even if that was not the intention. Cynics will say that WAS the intention, but fairness demands that we recognize the primary intention was in fact to prevent a depression. The Calvinist assumption is a form of fundamentalism that needs to be weighed against the public good.
Failure in critical thinking is sure part of it. Next question: why does it fail? In individuals, why does it fail? In political society, why doesn’t the failure get noticed and corrected sooner, and more adroitly?
To paraphrase an earlier Kochism, being critical is only one use for thinking.
Something tells me to look to the ebb and flow among us of various deep myths about our relations with the world. Like karma. Or eye-for-an-eye.
If a general sense – it’ll be sub-rational – gains momentum that some universal moral order is being breached, it’s like water flowing from one side to the other below decks. The tilt is self-accelerating. Looking at the wind and compass and playing with the tiller isn’t going to help much.
In other societies, when the universe has needed propitiating, people rushing to the downside found other people or valuables to sacrifice overboard, or to reduce to little weightless pieces.
What’s needed is more weight on the up side, hiking out or ballast to limit the ultimate degree of heeling, and to slow the rush until self-righting can start to work.
So what would be other, countervailing and steadying myths we could call up and conjure into expression? The Fisher King? Atman, as the universal soul in us all?
Any Jungians out there?
Thanks, Tim, for giving me an idea for a television series (thirteen episodes) about Eye-for-an-Eye fundamentalists.
The answers are all in Toqueville.
A provocative essay by Lee Siegel in last Sunday’s NYTimes Book Review links the Tea Partiers to the Beat counterculture of the late 50s and early 60s! An unlikely pairing one would think, but he makes a case.