By Mike Appleton (Guest Blogger)
In 1773 the British East India Company was broke. In an effort to prevent bankruptcy, and the resulting loss of the crown’s investment, the British government eliminated all taxes on domestic tea sales and granted the company a monopoly on tea shipments to the American colonies. In December of that year radicals boarded ships in Boston harbor and threw $75,000.00 worth of tea overboard. The first Tea Party was a violent reaction to monopolistic economic power protected by government.
The modern Tea Party doesn’t understand history, so it can’t be expected to appreciate irony. It is a mongrel movement, its leaders self-proclaimed, its agenda by turns unfathomable and incoherent, its philosophy grounded in vehemence. So how can it possibly be dangerous? Here, in no particular order, are my four Rs of the Tea Party.
1. It is racist. I know. I just played the race card. But the best way to stop someone from playing the race card is to quit dealing it. Public expressions of bigotry began as soon as Barack Obama was nominated at the Democratic convention, and continued throughout the campaign, during which prominent Republicans referred to him as “boy,” “uppity” and other vulgarities. In short order he became a socialist and a Marxist and was then transformed into an extremist Arab Muslim. Sarah Palin eventually settled on the euphemistic “let’s take our country back,” but we all knew what she meant. The Tea Party began forming before the inauguration and was printing “Don’t Tread on Me” posters while the Obama family was still unpacking in the White House. On April 15, 2009, the Tea Party was protesting a tax burden that was, and is, the lowest in 60 years.
The Tea Party has promoted ugly forms of nativism, including punitive immigration laws, English only legislation and bans on the teaching of ethnic studies. It is the 1840s once again, but the targets are Muslims and Hispanics rather than Germans and Irish.
2. It is a religionist movement. I don’t know if religionism is a word, but I use it to describe a phenomenon distinct from traditional religion: religion as political philosophy. It is the view that the Constitution was divinely inspired, that America is God’s gift to mankind, that capitalism is mandated by Holy Scripture and that the notion of “social justice” is the work of the Antichrist. It is a culmination of the fundamentalist reaction in the early 1900s to Darwin and the progressive movement. It has spawned a form of Christian imperialism that justifies the “crusades” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supports Israel uncritically and sends American politicians to Africa to lobby for the death penalty for homosexuals.
3. It is repressive. The Tea Party is committed to authoritarianism. Lawmakers in Congress and throughout the country, particularly in states with heavily Republican legislatures, have been imposing humiliating burdens on women’s constitutional rights at breakneck speed. They are simultaneously reducing taxes on business and cutting funding for education and health care. The regulation of entire industries is being eliminated in certain states. The integrity of public employees has been impugned and their rights to organize curtailed. Laws banning the phony threat of sharia are pending in a dozen states. The independence of the judiciary has been threatened by proposals to reduce courts’ rule-making authority and politicize the judicial selection process.
4. It is revisionist. The Christian right and its supporters in legislatures and on school boards have demanded that high school history texts be rewritten to eliminate references to the deism endorsed by many of the Founders in favor of promoting the false notion of America as an exclusively Christian nation. The history of slavery and the Civil War is being falsified to satisfy the desires of apologists for the Confederacy and southern “values.” Science cannot be re-written, but it can be denied. The sciences of climate change and evolutionary processes have become the subjects of unnecessary controversy.
Robert La Follette, a founder of the progressive movement, became governor of Wisconsin in 1900 and immediately took on the railroads, forcing them to pay higher taxes on their assets. When the new governor of Wisconsin took office this year, he immediately took on labor in an effort to destroy public employee unions and cover the cost of new tax reductions for business. But like I said earlier. People who don’t understand history can’t appreciate irony.
Stamford,
don’t work too hard.
rafflaw,
Thanks – Just goes to show that the teabaggers still can’t get history right.
Looks like I missed some exciting troll-bashing! But, alas, can’t stick around to contribute as we are positively swamped with bankruptcy filings this month … will try and pop in again!!
Stamford,
Amen to that Lind article.
Very good article Salon.com posted back in September, 2010:
Tuesday, Sep 21, 2010 07:01 ET
The right picked the wrong historical analogy
The real parallel to today’s conservative backlash isn’t the Boston Tea Party. It’s the Whiskey Rebellion
By Michael Lind
The right picked the wrong historical analogy
“Is it a rebellion?” the doomed king of France, Louis XVI, is supposed to have asked in 1789. “No, sire,” a minister allegedly replied. “It is a revolution.” The right-wing Tea Party movement in the United States in 2010 is not a revolution. It is a rebellion.
The movement chose the wrong historical precedent when it selected the Boston Tea Party of 1773, a genuinely revolutionary event, as its symbol. Today’s Tea Party movement is much more like the misguided and ill-fated Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s, during the first term of America’s first president, George Washington.
The Whiskey Rebellion originated as a protest against the plan that Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary of the United States, devised to pay down the federal and state debts that had been left over from the War of Independence. Hamilton proposed that the federal debt be funded at par — that is, at face value, even though it was trading at only a fraction of that face value. And he proposed that the federal government assume and pay the outstanding debts of the states. These actions, Hamilton persuaded President Washington and Congress, would establish the new nation’s credit worthiness in the eyes of European creditors, making it less expensive for the federal and state governments to borrow money in the future.
From Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was Hamilton’s rival in George Washington’s Cabinet, down through the many Democratic-Republican societies to the backwoods of Appalachia, critics of Hamilton’s plan denounced it as a giveaway to the Northeastern rich. Virginia and several other Southern states had paid their wartime debts and objected to being taxed to pay down the debts of other states. In addition, much of the debt had ended up in the hands of Northeastern speculators, whose agents had traveled through rural areas buying debt instruments at a fraction of their face value. Funding the debt at face value would provide these speculators with a huge windfall.
When Congress in 1791, at Hamilton’s suggestion, enacted an excise tax on whiskey, along with a tariff, to help pay down the consolidated national debt, the result was the Whiskey Rebellion. Resistance to federal tax collection by frontier settlers in Pennsylvania escalated until 1794, when hundreds of armed men attacked the home of a federal tax inspector. When Washington mobilized the militia, the insurrection collapsed, and the small number of rebels who were arrested were pardoned.
Today’s Tea Party movement resembles the Whiskey Rebellion — but emphatically not because it is supported only by ignorant yahoos, as many critics of the Tea Partiers contend. On the contrary, just as the Tea Party is supported and subsidized by many elite conservatives, so the Whiskey Rebellion’s sympathizers included members of the early republic’s elite, including Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant who later became President Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the Treasury. (The mature Gallatin adopted much of the Hamiltonian philosophy he had denounced in his youth and proposed a massive, federally funded canal and road system.)
Whether they are educated or not, the supporters of the Tea Party movement, like the supporters of the Whiskey Rebellion, are deeply confused. The Whiskey Rebels failed to understand that the federal funding of state debts almost certainly spared them much higher state taxes in the long run. Although the federal excise tax on whiskey was regressive, as a whole Hamilton’s scheme for funding the state debts was more progressive than debt payment schemes by the individual states would have been. For example, the state of Massachusetts alone had planned to pay its debt by raising more than $1 million a year in new taxes. In contrast, the interest on the consolidated national debt of $75.6 million required only $4.6 million from the entire United States. And whereas states repaying their debt would have relied heavily on highly regressive property taxes or poll taxes, the federal government raised revenue mainly from tariffs paid primarily by the affluent. While the rich disproportionately benefited from federal assumption of state debt, they also disproportionately paid the costs, sparing ordinary Americans the taxes that the states otherwise might have imposed. But the Whiskey Rebels were too busy grabbing their muskets to understand their own interests.
In the same way, the Tea Partiers who denounce the TARP and the 2009 stimulus fail to understand that the alternatives to those much-demonized policies would have been much worse. In a financial crisis, the government must rescue the financial system on which the rest of the economy depends. Progressives can plausibly argue that it would have been better to nationalize the banks, while recapitalizing them. But Tea Party conservatives who argue that the government should have allowed the national and global banking systems simply to collapse are, to be blunt, ignorant fools. And they are ignorant fools, too, when they argue that the 2009 stimulus was too large, when in fact it was too skewed toward tax cuts and too small to play its necessary role in boosting aggregate demand when consumer spending had cratered. The depth of their ignorant folly is demonstrated by the fact that most credible Republican conservative economists supported both the TARP and some sort of stimulus.
In another, even more important respect, the Tea Party resembles the Whiskey Rebellion rather than the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was the beginning of a genuine popular revolution whose purpose was not to oppose government as such, but to transfer government from unelected rulers in Britain to elected representatives in the U.S. Once that transfer had taken place, the federal and state governments had the right to impose taxes, even stupid and counterproductive taxes, which Americans were free to protest against — but only by means short of violence. George Washington was perfectly consistent in leading the revolution against illegitimate British authority and later taking to the saddle again, as president, to assert the legitimate authority of the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion.
From the Whiskey Rebels to the Confederates to the Tea Party movement, there has been a minority tradition that viewed the American Revolution as a rebellion against government as such, rather than as a revolution on behalf of popular government. And from Thomas Jefferson to Newt Gingrich, crafty demagogues, when they are out of power, have portrayed the elected representatives of the American people as a tyrannical, alien force, only to exercise the full powers of the government without apology once they have successfully ridden paranoia to power.
Claims that the nation is about to be crushed by runaway debt have been part of the demagogic tradition, ever since Jefferson battled Hamilton while both served in the administration of Washington. Hamilton was confident that economic growth would permit the U.S. to pay down the consolidated federal and state debts that the anti-statists of his day found so horrifying. He told his friend and mentor, the financier Robert Morris: “Speaking within moderate bounds, our population will be doubled in thirty years; there will be a confluence of emigration from all parts of the world, our commerce will have a proportionate progress and of course our wealth and capacity for revenue. It will be a matter of choice if we are not out of debt in twenty years, without at all encumbering the people.” History proved him right. The deficit hysterics of Hamilton’s day were wrong about the national debt then, and their demagogic, fear-mongering political descendants in the present day are just as wrong to suggest that debt is an imminent threat to the nation.
While pursuing negotiations with the Whiskey Rebels, President Washington put on his uniform and reviewed the troops assembled at Fort Cumberland, Md., in case they were needed. The violence of the Tea Party to date has been purely rhetorical. Its members will maul, not individual tax collectors, but the tax code, if the movement succeeds in sending even more intransigent reactionaries to the already paralyzed Congress and the Senate in this fall’s midterm elections.
They can gum up the works, but that is all they can do. Like the Whiskey Rebels of the 1970s, the misnamed Tea Partiers do not understand their own interests and have no plausible alternative program for the nation. They may pose as revolutionaries, but they are only a mob.
Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of “The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/09/21/lind_tea_party_whiskey_rebellion
Swarthmore,
Unless I am missing the point of Chomsky’s article, you are correct. What happened to the groups that helped the Nazi’s gain power? They didn’t last long once Hitler got full power.
rafflaw, Right, Maybe the communists in Germany thought like Chomsky, and they ended up being purged.
Swarthmore,
I have to respectfully disagree with Prof. Chomsky on this issue. The Tea party is not ripe for the picking for Liberals. They are radical, racist and greedy individuals who don’t care about their neighbors. They care about numero uno!
… who, of course, turned out to be the same old “Tricky Dick”
SwM,
That article by Craig (your link to laprogressive) was really right on the money.
Teabaggers are trying to deal with the huge negative impact their candidates have had on the populations in the states they won. They are spinning their words so fast and furiously that it’s making them dizzy … reminds me of the “New Nixon” …
http://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/love-thy-tea-bagger/ A discussion of the tea bagger apologists on the left.
“That’s because corporations don’t care about anything. They’re a process, not an intelligence.”~Gyges
——————————–
..except for that little bit of something that SCOTUS gave them….?….personhood … by what they apparently see as the most important aspect of personhood, i.e. purchasing power.
http://humboldtherald.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/corporate-personhood-wins-big-in-us-supreme-court/
Gyges,
“I am trying to decide if they’re tools that are being misused by sociopaths or tools that have a side effect of creating pseudo-sociopaths.”
Honestly? I think it’s a combination of both dynamics.
Otteray,
I doubt the Liberals and the Tea Partiers would ever come to an agreement as to what that “something else” would be. That would be why I wouldn’t perceive it as a common goal.
Raff, I do not presume to speak for 43N. He is a big boy and can speak for himself if he so chooses. However, I think the reference is to the fact that extremes on both sides sometimes have a common goal; in this case, to get rid of what we have and install something else. Now that “something else” is going to take quite a different form, just as the Communists got badly burned when their partners in crime turned on them in 1933-34.
Buddha,
I am trying to decide if they’re tools that are being misused by sociopaths or tools that have a side effect of creating pseudo-sociopaths. The idea of a corporation is to separate the person from the business. When effective that can also shield the person’s conscious from the results of the businesses actions. Meaning that a person who would never dream of lighting a kid on fire might decide not to recall the pinto because it’s not their actions that are causing the deaths, it’s the companies.
The two have different implications as far as solutions to the current problems. If it’s a problem with sociopaths running things, then it’s a matter of enforcement. If it’s a problem with creating sociopaths, then there needs to be a restructuring of society and the legal system surrounding corporations.
Gyges,
I agree. Corporate personality, in the legal sense of the term, has gotten out of hand as has the public perception of corporations. They are not real people. They are tools being misused by sociopaths to avoid liability both civil and criminal.
Ahem,
Was called away by a thirsty dog “…instead of anthropomorphizing them the sooner we stop making fetishes of them.”
Buddha,
That’s because corporations don’t care about anything. They’re a process, not an intelligence. I think the sooner we start speaking about them in those terms instead of anthropomorphizing them.
I wonder if our true modern pantheon isn’t “corporations.”
There is a difference between advocating violence and warning that it is likely an inevitable outcome due to choices being made by the current and previous administrations. That difference is between lighting a match and saying “Hey, look . . . that building is on fire.”
To be clear: I prefer a peaceful solution.
In the wake of Congressional inaction to rectify the abomination that is Citizens United, however, I don’t think we’re going to get one.
Multi-national and large corporations don’t give a flying shit whether people suffer and die or not as long as they are maximizing their profits.
Elaine,
Going way back… Monk did play organ for a touring preacher in his teens.
Larry,
I thought Shakespeare coined words all the time.