Sarah Palin condemns crony capitalism.

Yesterday Sarah Palin condemned crony capitalism and was, apparently, cheered for it by her audience of supporters. This could be a sign that the Tea Party is beginning to realize that its ranting about "socialism" has been misdirected. Yes, there is a bit of socialism here and there in the US economy and in government policies, but it is really rather minor, not significantly more than it has been for decades and not a root cause of the Great Recession. That's much more due to government doing favors for selected business sectors such as housing and finance and carelessness about such matters as moral hazard, market distortion and fiduciary irresponsibility. Government spending through excessive use of credit, and encouraging the same by households, was also an underlying cause. This has little to do with "socialism" in any proper meaning of the term.

I prefer the shorter, simpler term "corporatism", especially as cronyism is not always a part of it, but "crony capitalism" definitely comes much closer to identification of the disease than "socialism".

Christian right and the Tea Party

Mentioned by Michael Gerson at the WaPo:

One intriguing finding of the recent American Values Survey is that 55 percent of Tea Party supporters believe that "America has always been and is currently a Christian nation." The figure among Christian conservatives is 49 percent. According to the survey, the Tea Party movement is less religious than the traditional Christian right. Yet a higher percentage of Tea Party supporters believe in a Christian America.

So what would account for this anomaly? Perhaps there is more similarity between the Tea Party movement and the traditional Christian right than is obvious, the overlap being obscured by an expedient public disassociation a bit like that of Sinn Féin and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). I am not completely convinced by accounts of the Tea Party's origin as mainly a tax revolt. Taxes are never popular but neither current taxes nor proposed ones are especially heavy by the standards of recent history, so why should a major anti-tax movement so suddenly develop now?

I believe the traditional Christian right was manipulated by secular, or at least non-Christian, neoconservatives into supporting their global hegemonist agenda by appeals to fear of Islamic terror. What if the Christian right learned practical lessons in subterfuge from the experience and now seeks to exploit the universal unpopularity of taxes and traditional conservative antipathy towards big government to advance a private agenda of its own? If it is true that a higher percentage of Tea Party supporters than the traditional Christian right believe in a "Christian America" then what will they prove to be really about if their candidates are elected?