Where George Washington and Today's Tea Party Part Company
Nothing in contemporary American politics irks me quite as much as how the so-called "tea party" movement wraps their collective selves up as representing the best interests of the Founding Fathers of America. It is one thing to dress up as Continental Soldiers with tricorner hats and shout "No taxes" slogans and wave "Don't Tread on Me" flags from the 1770's. It is another to acurately reflect the history of that period.
They simply don't do their homework about the schisms between those like Alexander Hamilton who saw a need for the United States to be a manufacturing power and those Jeffersonians who feared the rule of urban financiers and favored an agrarian economic system. We have had schisms in our nation from its founding: they cannot be reconciled as being of little consequence except by the ignorant activists among us who see wrapping themselves up in revolutionary garb as a way to rationalize away their desire to pay less taxes and let someone else bear the costs for endless wars and balancing state budgets.
As Professor Paul Henriques of George Mason University in Virginia writes:
'In seeking to reconcile Hamilton and Jefferson (whose views were every bit as divergent as those of the tea party and Obama are today), the president eloquently urged forbearance: "I would fain hope that liberal allowances will be made for the political opinions of one another; and instead of those wounding suspicions and irritating charges there might be mutual forebearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides, without which I do not see how the reins of government are to be managed."
For the full article, please see the link below:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/print/700078995/Would-Washington-join-the-tea-party.html
From the 2008 HBO Mini-Series "John Adams"--Paul Giamatti is Vice President Adams, Stephen Dillane is Secretary of State Jefferson, Rufus Sewell is Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, and David Morse is President Washington.
I know they say it's about taxes and taking back their country...but really I believe it's Obama that they just simply hate...never has a president been opposed by the right in such away as Mr Obama has...lock step opposition to anything and everything he tries to do..a sad time in this country for sure Doug.
ReplyDeleteI quite agree Mike. Sad times.
ReplyDeleteI thought the far Right gave Clinton a smear from the moment he took office....until these last two years. That they make the complex history of our young republic seem so simplistic is all the more annoying.
And If Obama should be accused of any misconduct I'm sure the results would be very different than with Clinton.
ReplyDeleteYes, hopefully the likes of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint will overplay their hand and take witch-hunting too far...hopefully I say.
ReplyDeleteof course everyone's history is different from others. Now My history teachers taught me that the tea party was 1773 in Boston and had nothing to do with Washington. Samuel Adams pretty much brought the Boston tea party about. I was taught that the colonists were tired of paying taxes with out representation ( Actually I was taught that they said"No taxation without representation). and he and some guys painted their faces and pretended to be Indians and threw the tea in the harbor. So in the general theory if people group together because they feel they have no representation they DO fit in the Boston tea party and yes you are right it had nothing to do with Washington, Washington is a different piece of history
ReplyDeleteTess, I am aware of the Boston Tea Party---have been since I was ten years old. The history I learned in school was likely no different from yours.
ReplyDeleteMy point here is that the tea party leaders talk as if the founders of our country were in lockstep--as they are--in their ideas of America's future. They are either being dumb or playing dumb when it comes to history. Sarah Palin was asked on Fox News who her favorite founding father was--she said "All of them!"
Somebody call Charlie---he's missing one of his angels.
We now govern ourselves, without aid of the British, and there have been ideological riffs here since the first Administration of George Washington in 1787. That was my point. If you want to believe this is only about representation, fine. I know the lobbyists on K Street in Washiington are getting represented well. They represent banking and medical insurance interests that are transfering whealth up the ladder in this country from workers to dividend collectors.
Many people in the tea party movement I believe don't just want to taxed---period. . The only way to justify opting out of the social contract that is the United States of America is to slander all government programs that don't directly help them in some way. They want a balanced budget in Washington but none of their leaders who got elected will say how they will do that and cover the 800 billion in tax breaks to the top two percent of Americans over the next decade. If this makes sense to you, please blog about that on your site and enlighten some people.
. Representation is not the issue--these are hard times and many are worried about their jobs, naturally. But they can't take it out on mortgage corporations and investment banks, so they vote out politicians. OK, fair enough. But the plain fact is they try to sell a past of unity that never existed.
Doug, you're being kind.
ReplyDeleteNone of those people can spell.
They sit in their Hoverounds at rallies and decry 'entitlements' - not realizing that it was Medicare which paid for their scooters.
They're the collective result of fifty years or more of abysmal American education. Small wonder they don't know anything about real history - the very concept of critical thought is not part of their existence.
We're in for a rough time, Doug. It may be time to look for the exits, and leave this place to the semiliterate nose-pickers.
I read in Newsweek about one reporter who asked an older tea party person just how she could justify cutting government entitlements when she was getting Social Security and Medicare. She reportedly said, "well, that's a conundrum".
ReplyDeleteYes, what the hell happened to critical thinking? I had to debate both sides of an issue in classes I took in social studies. And I had to be *gasp* logical about what I was saying. All I hear out of this lot is "Cut government spending, balance the budget, protect me from terrorists and hand me another tax cut while you're at it."
It's going to get rough Will, and many of us have nowhere to go. So we may have to throw a "party" of our own. Some think the left can't create a movement anymore. They are going to find out otherwise.
I'll come back to this later, but I think Washington is rolling over in his grave.
ReplyDeleteThis country has argued over many of the same opinions they argue over now since conception. Any one who has had entry level US History knows that. Unfortunately not every one has been exposed to anything more advanced than television editorials on FAUX. Very well presented post Doug. And so very true.
ReplyDeleteIt does not pay to try and explain to people that have made up their minds that the tea party( which is just a name and not a real political party). it is made up of a diverse group of disgruntled Americans. You either get it or you do not. and the people that do no,t will love the negativity written about the Tea Party
ReplyDeleteI 'get' that the Teabaggers aren't a party.
ReplyDeleteThey're a 'movement' - like the one I took this morning before logging on.
That said - we dismiss them at our own peril - it's easy to say that people like those here are morons - and we'd be right for reaching that conclusion - but they're in a regrettable majority here in America, thanks to fifty years of abysmal education - and the inability to spell.
They're the brownshirts of the New Republican Party, which was co-opted by extremists after 9/11.
Oh, I know who they are, all right....
Good to know you are regular. I thought maybe you were constipated you are so grouchy and never in a good mood. Maybe more fiber?
ReplyDeleteWell put Mary Ellen. You got in two sentences what took me half a page!
ReplyDeleteYour blog on "The Fools Parade" is right on, Will. Much of middle America--at least those people who have little better to do--seem quite a fearful bunch. Wish they or their parents had paid more attention to their own country's history.
ReplyDeleteDoug, fear and a lack of education is a very, very dangerous combination - the concept of 'the-blind-leading-the-blind' comes to mind when I think of the crop of morons they just elected.
ReplyDeleteRand Paul wants to quit paying the national debt and privatize Social Security. Michele Bachmann wants to start impeachment proceedings. John Boehner wants to not only repeal the health-care bill - he wants to shut the entire government down!
Meanwhile, the Tea Party types gloat that they've 'won'.
I fail to see what they've 'won'. Everyone is going to lose out of this affair, and we will be fortunate as a nation to avoid catastrophe, both economic and societal, as a result.
(I learned this morning that another one of these clowns wants to 'neuter Iran'. Good luck with that.)
I come to this as an outsider so the first thing I want to say is thanks for posting this clip Doug, this programme looks like real historiography and I would like to see more of it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there are a couple of things to say as an outsider looking in - and the first thing is that US foreign policy seems to have been almost entirely absent from the domestic agenda and has played no part so far as I can see in the US midterm elections.
This is quite different to the era of the 'founding fathers' when foreign relations with France and Britain were central to the Revolutionary struggle for nationhood I think.
The tern founding fathers actually has I think something of an infantilized ring to it, at least to my foreign ear...only children depend upon 'fathers' to this degree in my opinion, but this strange hero worship seems to me endemic to American political culture.
I agree from what I have seen that the Tea Party is just a media hyped and fabricated 'movement' of uneducated, politically naive overgrown infants, who have not really made very much substantial impact at all, in actuality how could they?
The results of the midterm elections this time are it seems to me exactly the same as the results of the last who knows how many midterm elections and nothing very unusual has happened.
If Obama and the Democrats had retained control of the House of Representatives it would have really been 'something to write home about' ....the fact that they didn't is completely unremarkable so far as I can see.
The American electoral system is like something out of Alice In Wonderland anyway, there is not even a hint of 'democracy' about it so far as I can determine, it just seems completely absurd to me.
However, from the world beyond America this just looked like another Tweedle Dee-v- Tweedle Dum contest anyway (to continue the Lewis Carroll metaphor)....so far as the outside world is concerned you cannot get a cigarette paper between the Republicans and the Democrats.
US foreign policy is across the (non-existent) spectrum hegemonic, aggressive, militarised, bombastic and positively psychopathic under both Democrat and Republican......so Obama looks no different to Bush to the vast majority of the citizens of planet Earth, its business as usual for the Washington mob.
What's emerged therefore from these elections is a hegemonic monopolistic superpower which is all there was before, with no discernable difference at all.
It seems to me on both the domestic and the global fronts America is absolutley unviable, a failed state and a failed empire.
So perhaps the one lesson Americans should be taking from the founding fathers is that they need a revolution, undoubtedly even more today than they did in the last quarter of the 18th century?
The first step in achieving that is surely to stop harking back to the long dead revolutionaries and the champions of the long dead American Enlightenment as enshrined in the long dead Constitution and to finally grow up and take responsibility for the destiny of the delinquent unipolar spoiled superbrat that America has become.
To me the Tea Party is no more a reality than Disneyland, Manifest Destiny or DC comics, their impact on the outcome of the midterm elections appear to me to be exactly zilch....turnout increased relative to the last U.S. midterm elections without any significant shift in voters' political identification....a storm in a tea (party) cup is how it looks from here.
Thats my two-penneth on the matter Doug, thanks for creating a platform for these exchanges of views.
Just all the talk about making tax cuts for the rich permanent and reducing the deficit in the same time period are enough to convince me these people are pandering fools who just want power and will say ANYTHING to hold it.
ReplyDeleteInvade Iran. Oh, golly, that's brilliant! I'm surprised many of these reactionaries don't want to invade Canada for their "tar sands" deposits.
Hopefully Herr Bismarck was right and God will still watch out for fools, drunks and the USA, Will.
First off, AA, I hope you get a chance to rent the series "John Adams" or, better yet, that it gets shown soon in England. I think its really one of the best things on American television in the last decade, period.
ReplyDeleteThere is a sense that, to paraphrase Washington himself in the editorial I cited, that there is in fact no reason why future generations of men (and now women) such as ours cannot be as just and forward-thinking as the men who created our government.
In truth we are a long ways from these men and their times. The Bill of Rights and other guarantees of Free Expression in public affairs are immensely valuable, as is our central idea of one union among many entities.
But I also agree we cannot look upon these men as "fathers", but more as distant relations, "Founding Cousins", perhaps. Many of them brave; some of them very well-read and many a couple flat-out brilliant. But, these times have changed and we must stand up on our own feet and deal with America as it is now, and not as some would will it to be in their fantasies to lure voters to a false dawn that will only lead to more delusions.
I might cite some differences between the two major parties, but in many ways you are right. AA--these birds in in leadership roles are all too often more alike one another than I normally care to admit.
Thanks for your "Letter from England". I appreciate the added perspective.
And you are quite right. It was shameful of both political parties not to deal with foreign policy concerns, especially the wars. We are a bankrupt empire, and that is something that we need maturity to accept--a maturity lacking on both sides of the political spectrum I'm afraid.
I hope you are right Doug. It's a scary thought that we will be steamrollered by the right wing juggernaut.
ReplyDeleteI get more confidant about this with every day, Jim. Not recklessly optomistic, but confident that once the details of what the Republicans want to do on taxes to mainly benefit millionaires and cut social spending, there shall be a backlash. The harder part will be making it stick, of course, but that's always the hard part with an electorate.
ReplyDeleteA fickle bunch I find.
ReplyDeleteVery much so Jim.
ReplyDelete"...Alexander Hamilton who saw a need for the United States to be a manufacturing power and those Jeffersonians who feared the rule of urban financiers and favored an agrarian economic system"
ReplyDeleteI think we can have both, but I also think the banks are too powerful.
Our "forefathers" didn't wholeheartedly agree on very much, really. I'm glad they were able to work things out though. Times have changed, people have changed, and we are no longer 13 colonies with a total population of a million or so people. For the time it was written in, our Constitution is a wonderful document. I'm just trying to understand some of the "interpretations". It seems pretty clear to me, really, and most of the Amendments are, I think, good ones. The document grows with the population. The problem is, the Tea Party is looking in the wrong place for answers. Corporations that run roughshod over people's rights, and banks that run our government are where we need to look, not cutting benefits to people who need them.
But, that's me. I'm old fashioned and a "nutty conspiracy theorist"!
"...Alexander Hamilton who saw a need for the United States to be a manufacturing power and those Jeffersonians who feared the rule of urban financiers and favored an agrarian economic system"
ReplyDeleteI think we can have both, but I also think the banks are too powerful.
Our "forefathers" didn't wholeheartedly agree on very much, really. I'm glad they were able to work things out though. Times have changed, people have changed, and we are no longer 13 colonies with a total population of a million or so people. For the time it was written in, our Constitution is a wonderful document. I'm just trying to understand some of the "interpretations". It seems pretty clear to me, really, and most of the Amendments are, I think, good ones. The document grows with the population. The problem is, the Tea Party is looking in the wrong place for answers. Corporations that run roughshod over people's rights, and banks that run our government are where we need to look, not cutting benefits to people who need them.
But, that's me. I'm old fashioned and a "nutty conspiracy theorist"!
You are right, Jacquie. We are working against people who flatter themselves that they have a monopoly on patriotism and represent the "real America" (Sarah Palin's words, not mine.) If they can convince enough people that Reagan's style of trickle-down economics didn't cause most of this mess, they can continue to blame the federal government--an entiity whose biggest collective fault is , as you say, that it is run by, of and for the major investment bankers.
ReplyDeleteThanks for adding so much clarity here.
Oh, you mean the "voodoo economics" of the Reagan era, that cost so many people their jobs and much of the American Industry to be sold to, or got out of business because of the Japanese either buying the companies, or producing a cheaper less reliable product?
ReplyDeleteLike steel? And 7-11? American buildings and roads, paid for by the Japanese?
Reagan was very good to corporate bankers, I think. He also closed mental hospitals and orphanages with no where to put the people who were put out.
Those economics? lol
I'm sorry, Doug, I didn't mean to post twice. I seem to be having a problem connecting to Multiply tonight.
ReplyDeleteThe very same "voodoo economics" disaster indeed, Jacquie. Popular as they were with some in the short term, they were, coupled with hyper-deregulation of financial markets, a time bomb in the long run, weren't they?
ReplyDeleteNo problem Jacquie. I've had my share of postings run amok. I guess that's why they call this place Multiply. ;-)
ReplyDelete