Be careful what you wish for, teabaggers

The Tea Party movement in the United States saw its most high-profile electoral success last Tuesday with the primary election of Rand Paul, son of the notorious Texas Libertarian Ron Paul, to be the Republican candidate for Senator in Kentucky. The pundits told us it was a “victory over the Washington establishment” delivered by voters seething with anger. Paul’s mainstream Republican challenger had received the endorsement of long-serving Republican senators, while Paul had been endorsed by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. “This is a message to Washington from the Tea Party!” shouted an elated Paul at his victory speech.

But it wasn’t long before the reality began to sink in about exactly who the teabaggers were pushing into power. Like his father, Paul is an adherent to a uniquely American brand of ultra-orthodox Libertarianism. This strain of thought opposes almost all government interference in people’s lives. It is opposed to income tax, the environmental protection agency, the FBI, the Americans with Disabilities Act, government pensions, medicare, you name it. If the government does it, they want it killed.

Lately this kind of non-government ideology has been gaining popularity amongst an increasingly radicalized American public. The Tea Party movement, born out of citizen anger over Barack Obama’s efforts to give all Americans health insurance, has morphed into a snowballing anti-government crusade that seems like it won’t be content until Washington has been burned to the ground. Spurred on by Fox News, the most watched news network in the US, the Teabaggers believe that the US government is “out of control”, developing into an authoritarian super-state that seeks to regulate every area of their lives.

How individualism shapes the US healthcare debate

Of all the activities I expected to be engaged in Saturday night, finding myself at a bar in Switzerland vociferously defending the right to name a child Adolf Hitler was not one of them. But as it happens, this curious discussion about European naming regulations gave way to a very interesting conversation about the healthcare hullabaloo in the US – a debate that has perplexed Europeans over the past eight months.

The two very different attitudes in the conversation about whether the government should get involved in the naming of a baby was symptomatic of a larger divide between the Anglo-Saxon English-speaking world and continental Europe. Being reminded of this vast difference helped me to put into perspective Americans’ huge resistance to increasing healthcare coverage.

Talking about the US, a German friend of mine who lives in Zurich said he thinks it's strange how Americans give their children crazy names like Apple Blossom or Stapler, and such a thing would never happen in Germany. Of course the most extreme example of a bizarre name, widely reported in Germany, was the case of the neo-Nazi man in Pennsylvania who complained when a local supermarket refused to write his son’s legal name (Adolf Hitler) on a birthday cake. In Germany, where it is illegal to use any of the imagery of the Nazi party, people couldn’t believe that the government would allow someone to give their child such a name in the first place.

Did Sarko win?

It was a long battle, but looks like French president Nicolas Sarkozy may have won this round in his war with the French left. Or did he?

The past weeks have seen a broad range of unions take to the streets to protest Sarkozy’s attempted reforms of the French social system. Public transit workers, civil servants, teachers, nurses, tobacco shop owners, air traffic controllers, fishermen and even opera stagehands have taken to organized action in attempts to resist the changes. Last week nearly half of all universities in France were shut down by protests, and there are reports that soon lawyers and judges are also going to have a walk out.

Now of course such things are not unusual in France, it’s a nation quite fond of revolutions and street protests. But there’s been something very different this time around, found notably in the lack of public support for the strikers. This feeling that the public was not behind them was probably what convinced many of the transit unions to vote to return to work late last week. Sarkozy, it seems, isn’t prepared to blink any time soon, and the unions may be starting to do so.

This current battle is just the first of many that will come in the coming year, and the French people knew it was coming. Sarkozy’s entire election campaign was centred around his central slogan, “work more to earn more,” and was filled with promises to break the power of the unions and drastically alter the French social system, which many people see as crippling France’s productivity, making it impossible for the country to compete in the modern global economy.

But no one said it would be easy, and history has not been on the capitalist reformers’ side. Former President Jacques Chirac tried to take on the transport workers and their pensions in 1995, only to be forced to surrender after three weeks of industrial action. But Nicolas Sarkozy is a very different man than Jacques Chirac. He has been very direct and clear about the radically new direction he plans to take France in, and the public voted him in (relatively narrowly), thereby giving him a mandate for change. So far, the public seems to be sticking by their vote.

How long will their patience last? We are still in the early days of this fight, and long protracted strikes like those seen in France in the 60’s and 70’s may be too much for the public to take. Clearly, its too early to tell who will win this fight, but it’s clear that both sides are prepared to dig in their heels. The question is, who will blink first?

Stockholm

I'm here in Stockholm, just got back from my first day of interviews for the story I'm working on. Luckily all the appointments were relatively close to one another (it's a very centralized city, nice change of pace from London!) so it was relatively painless. Although they all started to get rather repetitive and by my last interview of the day I was definitly ready to be done.

So I'm back in my hotel room to write a quick blog before I meet my friend for dinner. My hotel is laughably horrible. I was trying to prove a point, or something, by booking the cheapest hotel I could find.