“It’s 1776 all over again, and now we got a House of Lords up here,” latter day tea-party protester William Temple told NPR in front of the Capitol yesterday. Temple was wearing Revolutionary war garb at the time, unlike the original Boston Tea Party participants, who dressed (unconvincingly) as Mohawk Indians to conceal their identities from British authorities.
Actually, it was 1773, not 1776 when the first Tea Party happened. Two hundred thirty-six years ago tonight, about fifty men occupied Griffin’s Pier in Boston Harbor and demanded the keys to the cargo hatches from the captains of three ships docked there. All in all they found 342 chests filled with tea. These were placed on the decks of the ships, broken open, and the tea was flung into the waters of the port. By the next morning there was so much tea still afloat that men went out in small boats to beat the tea under the water and spoil it; the tea party organizers were afraid that not all Bostonians were patriotic enough to refrain from collecting any unspoiled tea on the sly. Some of it survived; one scion of an old Bostonian family once showed me a small box of tea which, family legend had it, was shaken out of his ancestor’s clothes when he returned from dumping the tea into the harbor.
Today also marks the 320th anniversary of the English Bill of Rights as the Declaration of Rights became law. That Declaration once and for all settled the question of who had the power, Parliament or the King. It was part of the price William of Orange had to pay to have his seizure of the English throne made legal, and it remains in many ways today one of the cornerstones of Britain’s unwritten constitution.
Yesterday was Bill of Rights Day in the United States; our own Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution on December 15, 1790 after Virginia ratified the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Although nobody then living could imagine such an outcome, and the Bill of Rights would never have become law if they had, supreme court justices meeting far in the future would later decree that the United States of America had just been made safe for lap dancing and pornographic DVDs.
The new Tea Party movement, with all its anti-establishment energy, is the latest incarnation of something very old in the politics of the English speaking world. We don’t trust kings, we don’t trust congress, we don’t even trust each other very much. And when our rulers get carried away with their august sense of entitlement and self-importance, we lash out.
That ornery, individualistic spirit is still very much with us today. A new Gallup poll out today shows that by a slim 48% to 46% plurality, Americans oppose the health care bill that Congress has been trying to pass since the summer. Even more surprisingly, 52% of those polled told Rasmussen Reports that they opposed any further government regulation of the financial system. The sentiment isn’t always appropriate or rational. The heartfelt cry of a modern tea partier denouncing the current health care proposals of last summer made it onto a Yale University quotes of the year list: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”(Medicare is, of course, the very popular but unsustainably expensive government program that provides health care for Americans older than 65.) Odd though some of the talking points are, the tea party movement overall seems to be winning the argument with the wonks and the president. The latest Washington Post/ABC poll show continuing declines in support for health care reform, with most voters thinking that the effect of the change will be to make costs go up and quality go down.
Americans just don’t trust authority. One hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species, a majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution. A majority of Americans today reject the theory that human activity is responsible for global warming. Large numbers of Americans continue to reject the Warren Commission’s finding that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by a single assassin, acting alone. During the Bush administration, many ‘truthers’ believed that the government was somehow mixed up in 9/11. Other Americans still believe that there is a legitimate controversy about whether Barack Obama was born here. Many went to their graves believing that Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. (For the record, I’m not saying that the current Tea Party movement is largely composed of fanatical crackpots. Like most mass movements in American history, the majority of its members are sensible and thoughtful people. The crackpot fringe is always there with movements on both the left and the right, but most tea partiers, I suspect, are neither ‘birthers’ nor ‘truthers’ or any other species of loon.)
Some people look at all this ornery, crackpot skepticism and wring their hands in beautifully choreographed motions of horror, performing elegant little elitist dances and pirouettes on the subject of how wretchedly ignorant and unreformed the poor unwashed masses are. This for centuries has been one of the ways American (and British) writers could build reputations among the affluent and cultivated minority and done well today it is a surefire road to good book reviews and tastefully genteel little foundation grants.
Other people look at the mobs and the slogans and rush to catch up to the front of the parade, carrying pitchforks and torches and hoping to ride the tide of public anger into political and economic power. This too, can work. As Ann Coulter and many others can attest, while you get worse (or no) book reviews this way, you sell more books. There’s a lot more peasants out there than there is professors.
I’m kind of stuck in the middle. On the one hand, I can’t quite join the chorus of disdain and reprobation that our literary, cultural and social elite hurls in the faces of the great unwashed. I’m glad that public suspicion of elites and governments, however misplaced at times, has contributed to the development of an Anglo-American tradition of personal liberty which I value very highly. If the snooty elites had their way, there would be no tea parties then or now — and no bills of rights.
On the other hand, there’s an awful lot of claptrap and balderdash out there in some of these populist movements and even snooty elites are sometimes right about what the country needs.
This has made me politically homeless. I’m a fan, not a partisan. I like the Anglo-American political and cultural process of contested debate and distributed power that keeps both the populists and the elites off balance, but I can’t sign a blood oath with either group. I’m almost as uncomfortable sipping tea in Widow Douglas’ parlor as I would be out in the hog wallow with Huck Finn’s Pa.
So there it is. I’ll never have a news show on Fox denouncing fancy pants pin-heads and I’ll never write delicate little essays for refined publications demonstrating incisively how much more tasteful and discerning I and my readers are than those vast grunting herds of bigots and know-nothings thundering past on the street. I’ll just quietly blog here at the American Interest, basking in the protections of our bills of rights and glorying in the wealth and diversity of a dynamic and divided (and sometimes downright wacky) society that somehow in spite of it all still remains at the cutting edge of the human adventure.