Justin Beiber and the TEA Party

Your pie maker recently asked an intern from the Institute for Women's Policy Research about how the male ideal changed from "tall, dark and handsome" to "small, pale and pretty."  He pointed out how he had once mistook a picture of the pop star for a five year old, and could not see how someone who might not need to shave yet could attract such attention.  This was intended to be rhetorical, almost an ironic lament, as a hearty diet in his youth and regular outdoor exercise put your pie maker closer to the first category. 

Her answer, however, was both immediate and insightful.  Women do not need the protection of a man anymore, at least women living in the parts of town with good police protection.  There is no need for women to put up with the risks associated with signs of high testosterone levels, as a man able physically defend her is equally able, and somewhat likely, to harm her.  Since laborers are no longer primary breadwinners, at least in families that can afford concert tickets, evidence of physical labor will be a sign of "otherness" at best, lower caste at worst.  Only very rarely would a man working with his hands be pointed out by their mothers or older sisters as objects of desire.  In other words, since women are in many ways better equipped to thrive in the modern economy, it's not surprising that the new heartthrobs are more effeminate.

Herein lies a fascinating view of the psychology of the generation gap that largely defines the TEA Party.  A man who reaches adulthood without the scars, sun-driven wrinkles and callouses that come from learning at the basics of maintaining his own land will rely on contracts with others to ensure the work gets done.  Those contracts require courts, police and a whole body of laws to ensure that they are enforced.  To keep inequities in contracts from turning into civil unrest or threats to public health, they must be monitored by regulators.  The wealth required to ensure that enough of those contracts get paid that an acceptable amount of work gets done requires a financial system that cannot lose money, and so must be carefully regulated and backed by public funds. A nation whose majority work in offices needs to import its goods, requiring globe-spanning security with the equipment and intelligence systems, foreign and domestic, to ensure that the empowering technologies that make life in the US comfortable do not get turned against us.  Someone has to pay for this, and aren't we Taxed Enough Already?


There's no doubt that the Baby Boomers who make up the majority of the TEA Party have benefited from this system, even helped build major parts of it.  But they have ushered in a world whose reward structure is very different from the one in which the Greatest Generation raised raised them.  "Self reliance" is hard, and much of what we used to call "progress" trades it for interdependence.  Successful politicians have managed to keep many of the mechanisms that provide this prosperity hidden via subsidies, tax incentives and mandates on employers and manufacturers, allowing them to run essentially as their own opposition.  When times are good, the costs for this can be easily absorbed in by steadily increasing tax revenues and corporate earnings.  Indeed, regulations create barriers to entry that heavily favor incumbents and enable genuine economic profits.

However, times are not good.  We need to choose whether government influence should become more visible, and our lack of independence made clear, or accept less comfortable lives with fewer services.  Classic notions of masculinity clearly argue for the latter, but it's clear those views are losing cachet.  There is a lot of unfocused anger in the national discussion today, and your pie maker thinks this trend is at the heart of it.  He's not entirely sure which side of it he falls upon, however.  Interconnectedness, another word for specialization, is the core of civilization, but too much leads to fragility, a system rife with single points of failure as each individual is needed to make vital services function.  There is no easy answer, but it helps to ask the right question.