Groucho Marx and the Tea Party

The view from Spain. Oscar Celador-Angón, senior lecturer of legal and social studies at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, writes in the daily Público, as summarized by The Week.

The rise of the Tea Party in the U.S. is baffling to Europeans, said Oscar Celador. The American economy is suffering a severe crisis that, “because of the limited protection offered by the American welfare state,” hits the working class hardest. Yet the phenomenon of this campaign season is a political movement, “driven by important personalities of the Republican Party,” that advocates lower taxes, less government, “and the disappearance of essential services like health care, pensions, and public education.” If these people take over the government, the U.S. could return to the dark ages that Europe has put behind it, in which only the wealthy have access to decent health care or university education, and elderly people beg in the streets.

What’s “truly peculiar” is that the deficit created by Obama is much lower than that created by Bush—and much of Obama’s spending was simply to repair the collapse of the financial system caused by the “uncontrolled capitalism” of the Bush era. To understand U.S. politics, we can only look to Groucho Marx, who said, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Of course, he was joking. The Tea Partiers are not.