Might Arthur Brooks' and Pete Wehner's description of three types of human nature suggest the Tea Party is a source of American renewal?

Ryan Streeter

There are three competing views of human nature at the heart of our debates about how we address our economic troubles, and they've been with us for a few hundred years. This thesis forms the basis of an article in today's American by American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks and Ethics and Public Policy Senior Fellow Pete Wehner. I would summarize the three views this way:

1. People are perfectible, and so we need to engineer society with institutions that make people better, smarter, happier. Utopians, socialists, communists and other fans of collectivism are found here.
2. People are fatally flawed, and so we need strong political power to limit the damage they can do to themselves and others. Hobbsian advocates of pure political power are in this camp, whether they are dictators or those who pursue non-democratic means within democracies to increase power and control economic affairs.
3. People are flawed but not fatally so, and capable of self-government and virtue, but not perfectible; and so they need to benefit from the exercise of virtue, and feel the effects of their mistakes if they are to correct course.  The American founders and others who prefer limited governments and strong markets fall in this camp.

The line of thought Brooks and Wehner pursue stems very much from a tradition familiar to readers of Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, Bea Himmelfarb, and other defenders of a robust democratic capitalism. I won't rehash those arguments here.

The main big idea here is the conclusion they reach that capitalism is ultimately the best system of social organization for building on the insights embedded in the third school of thought. Brooks and Wehner write:

A capitalist society needs to produce an educated citizenry. It needs to be buttressed by people who possess and who teach others virtues such as sympathy, altruism, compassion, self-discipline, perseverance, and honesty. And it needs a polity that will abide by laws, contracts, and election results (regardless of their outcome). Without these virtues, venality can eat capitalism from within and use it for pernicious ends.

We need to understand that capitalism, like democracy, is part of an intricate social web. Capitalism both depends on this web and contributes mightily to it. Morality and capitalism, like morality and democracy, are intimately connected and mutually complementary. They reinforce one another; they need one another; and they are terribly diminished without one another. They are links in a golden chain.

They don't lay out what this means for policy and action. For that, presumably, we need to acquire their new book from which this excerpt is adapted. 

So let me suggest one possible interpretation of their framework: the recent Tea Party-fueled public upheaval may very well be the third view of human nature making its voice heard again at a unique point in history. The Tea Party is apiece with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Scottish enlightenment? Perhaps.

Two considerations:

• The strong reaction to Keynesian stimulus and growing spending was very much a joint cry by millions of people to "let us run our own lives and live by the consequences." Some - especially those in elite quarters - see the tea partiers as ignorant crazies. But that's nothing new. That's how the original tea partiers were viewed. The Tea Party has been an effort to reverse a trend in which an frighteningly large amount of taxpayer money was being used by people who seemed to be trying their hand at social engineering and the brute expansion of political power. At the end of the day, the clash between the Tea Party and elite America looks like a clash between the third view of human nature and the first and second views.
• Although the Tea Party was driven very much by spending and fiscal concerns, there's not much evidence to suggest they don't also care about the kind of virtue and moral order that Brooks and Wehner discuss. Popular conceptions of the Tea Party suggest they are unenlightened radical libertarians. The ConservativeHome Republican Panel, a weekly survey of more than 2,000 conservatives, suggests that a large number of tea partiers and sympathizers are both fiscally and socially conservative. The Tea Party has an underlying moral component to it - or at least there's just as much evidence for this point than against it. Sure there are some nut cases out there. But tea partiers seem to be people who value hard work, independence, and the kinds of habits needed for people to be self-governing citizens.

The point here is that if one accepts the Brooks-Wehner delimitation of the three kinds of human nature, one has to wonder how they're playing out today. If the Tea Party has unleashed new energy to support the third view, one has to ask who the primary advocates of the first two views are today - on both the right and the left.