Many Use "Tea Party" Name--Inaccurately

Jill Lepore notes in The New Yorker that through American history political movements on all sides have appropriated the Boston Tea Party story for their own uses. Most, including the current radical right, involve a vast simplification of the complexities of the time that distorts historical fact.

Originalism in the courts is certainly a matter for debate. Jurisprudence stands on precedent, on the stability of the laws. But originalism has long since reached beyond the courts. Set loose in the culture, it looks like history but it’s not. It is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution. The history that Tea Partiers want to go back to is as much a fiction as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. (Current Tea Party member Patrick) Humphries quoted the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” He wants those powers. He feels disenfranchised. He didn’t vote for Obama; he doesn’t like what he’s doing. To Tea Partiers, Obama’s Administration, his very Presidency, is unconstitutional. Massachusetts is a foreign country. The present is a foreign country.

Today’s reactionary history of early America, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously anti-pluralist, ignores slavery and compresses a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if the ideas contained in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” severing the bonds of empire, were no different from those in the Constitution, establishing a strong central government. “Who’s your favorite Founder?” Beck asked Palin in January. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.”

--Ballard Burgher