WSJ’s John Fund: Tea Party movement is ‘essence of American individualism’

With official attendance put at 2,800, the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention in Richmond the weekend of October 8 and 9 was judged a success by its organizers.

Wall Street Journal political commentator John Fund was one of the convention’s featured speakers, and his assessment of the Tea Party movement confirmed that judgment.

‘Individualism and entrepreneurship’

The Tea Party movement, Fund told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview following his speech on Friday, is the “essence of American individualism and American entrepreneurship.  These are people who are disenfranchised by politics as usual.”

In response to disenfranchisement, he asked, “What do they do?  They went out and created their own organization that doesn’t have a [formal] leadership.  It’s spontaneous.”

Moreover, Fund added, Tea Party activists “have challenged the conventional wisdom in both political parties and they have accomplished major change in America just by forcing people to listen to the voice of those who want to slow down this engine of big government and want to return to first principles.”

The veteran journalist went on to say that he would not be surprised if, ten or fifteen years from now, a president was elected who began his political career in the Tea Party movement.

“After all,” he said, “it was only a few years after Prop 13 in California that we had Ronald Reagan as president.”

Then, a few years after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, “we elected congressmen like Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint, and several of those have moved over to the Senate now.”

‘Natural political evolution’

Fund argued that it is “a natural political evolution for a movement that gets its start in enthusiasm” to then realize “that it’s going to have to become part of the system by electing people who can carry out its first principles.”

Taking note that the Tea Party movement, in general, has deferred discussion of social and foreign policy issues in favor of a focus on fiscal matters, Fund said that “people consciously have decided, Job One is preserving our country as it was bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers:  the free enterprise system, individualism.  They feel that’s threatened.”

While they have concerns about social and foreign policy questions, he said, “Job One is getting our fiscal house in order and changing the runaway growth of government. Then, I think, we can move on to secondary and tertiary issues.”

Comeback for Term Limits

When offered a comparison of the Tea Party movement to the term limits movement of the 1990s, Fund, author of Stealing Elections, took the opportunity to suggest that term limits may return as a resonating issue in U.S. politics.

If the term limits movement “fizzled out,” he said, it was “because of one vote by one Supreme Court justice who misread the Constitution.”

Term limits, Fund predicted, “is coming back as an issue.”

He noted that “eighty percent of the American people still support it, even though it has not been on the front burner of American politics.”

Pointing out that the Supreme Court sometimes reverses its rulings after time has passed, Fund suggested that “there can be a second attempt to return to the courts and force some kind of resolution on the term limits issue.”

The Supreme Court, he asserted, “may well revisit this issue sometime in the future.”

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