I’m really not at all impressed with the Tea Party movement, for reasons Ed Brayton has explained at length. But I’m happy to defend them from a stupid criticism that’s been lobbed by Andrew Sullivan, especially since this is something atheists have to deal with a lot:

I like their broad philosophy:

“We’ve been running deficits for years, and we’ve been saying we’re doing it to win the Cold War or to fight terrorism and fight poverty,” says Michael Towns, 33, a linguist from Tallahassee who was among those surveyed. “I think our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves because they never would conceive that we would do this.”

I just don’t think the movement merits serious examination until it fleshes out what it’s actually for.

The absurdity of “I’m going to dismiss you because you’re not for anything” should be self-evident: successfully opposing bad things is good, and it’s good whether or not you do other good things above and beyond successfully opposing those bad things. But for some reason the “what are you for” question sounds good to a lot of people, so let’s take this slow.

First, it’s worth pointing out one small but actually pretty important accomplishment of analytic philosophy: encouraging people to think in terms of propositions, that is to particular claims about the world that are either true or false. When we think in these terms, we naturally avoid vague and often unmanageable questions like “how do we solve the problem of perception?” and can focus on questions like “is such-and-such claim true?” On those kind of questions, there are only two possible answers, yes and no, and it’s obviously silly for proponents of the “yes” to complain “oh, the proponents of the ‘no,’ are just being negative!” This is especially true, because questions can always be rephrased to switch the “yes” and the “no” positions–if necessary, this can be done by making the question “is such-and-such claim false?” but English often provides better resources for doing this, as in the couplet “should we allow deficit spending to continue?” / “should we balance the budget?”

If you think there’s any value in getting questions right, it should also be obvious that if the “no” is right on some point, they can at least claim to have that advantage over the “yes” even if they don’t have much else to contribute. If you know very little about the world but realize fairies don’t exist, you are better off than someone who is both ignorant and a believer in fairies. It is always a stupid retort to say “Perhaps we’re wrong to think the emperor is wearing clothes, but telling us we’re wrong isn’t going to do you any good unless you have something you’re for, now, is it?”

In principle, the “what are you for?” question might make sense in cases where the question is what to do, and it’s obvious that doing nothing is not an option. In a situation like that, a critic might successfully point out a dozen problems with a proposed solution, and yet the solution could remain the best because the critic has proposed no other. In debates about government policy, though, this is not typically the situation we face. There are a few areas where society could not function without the government, but public policy fights tend to happen over issues where government inaction would not be a catastrophe. This is especially true when people talk about “fixing” economic problems. Economic prosperity is something that happens on its own without specific government attempts to create it, and if the government never did anything every again specifically designed to boost the economy, the U.S. economy would not therefore collapse. This means doing nothing clearly is an option, and it makes no sense for defenders of a particular intervention in the economy to complain about lack of alternatives.

After all that, I feel like I still must be missing something here. There has to be some better way to interpret a line as popular as “what are you for?,” or at the very least there has to be a satisfying Hansonian explanation for why people like it. Does anyone have any insight into this?