It Would Almost Be Funny If It Weren’t True: The Tea Party Cult and Lessons from History

Glenn Beck: “Who’s your favorite Founder?”

Sarah Palin: “Um, you know, well...all of them.”

 

“The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance,” Christopher Hitchens once wrote in an essay titled Why Americans Are Not Taught History, adding, “And it seems at least thinkable that today’s history students don’t quite know what subject they are not being taught.” Not that Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or any of the other self-coronated leaders of the Tea Party movement could be rightly classified as students of history, but Hitchens’ analysis appears to be apt in their cases. Indeed, the first casualty of the Tea Party’s rhetoric—before civility, solidarity, or even racial justice—was history itself. Their anti-intellectual “historical fundamentalism,” as Harvard historian Jill Lepore calls it, is precisely what makes the Tea Party so internally inconsistent and externally intolerant.¹

 

When asked by Bill O’Reilly why she thinks the US is a Christian nation, Palin said that one “can just go to our Founding Fathers’ early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.”²

 

Thinking otherwise (and one must, considering the mountain of evidence to the contrary, perhaps most notably the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by John Adams, which declared that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”) is, according to Palin, “an attempt to revisit and re-write history.”

 

“When you read these guys,” Beck said on his show during one of his “Founders’ Fridays,” which he began in April of 2010, “it’s alive. It’s like, you know, reading the scriptures. It’s like reading the Bible. It is alive today. And it only comes alive when you need it.”³

 

The problem with scripture, of course, is that it can be interpreted by anyone to say almost anything, and even contradictory assertions made on its behalf cannot be questioned, let alone modified. If the Constitution, or, rather, Becks’ interpretation of it, is considered holy writ, then Beck becomes the only authority–not only with regards to our collective story but also to our continual education.

 

“New history standards were adopted in May 2010. They ensure that our children will learn what it means to be an American,” assures Don McLeroy, member and former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, in a Beck-esque editorial published in the Austin American-Statesman in December of 2010, adding: “The new standards require students to be taught the founding documents, American Exceptionalism, and the national mottos of ‘In God We Trust’ and ‘E Pluribus Unum.’”⁴ And the Texas State Board of Education should know what it means to be an American; erasing dissent is as old as the Sedition Act (which, coincidentally, like the Texas State Board’s proposal, could be seen as a means simply to discredit Thomas Jefferson).

 

Few people seem to realize how dangerous this trend has become. Beck once said on his show that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution.⁵ Nevermind that Paine wasn’t American (hear that, Birthers?) and was twice deported for being too anti-religious for his contemporaries, to me Beck appears less like Thomas Paine and more like Thomas Hobbes; both Beck’s and Hobbes’ proposed social contracts are based on an official, narrow history intended to codify class divisions and cement authoritarian control.⁶

 

Rober Bybee, writer for Z Magazine, remains more positive than I do about the chance for what he calls “progressive dialog” with members of the Tea Party movement because some of them claim to be against globalized trade, the influence of large corporations, and even standing armies. The Left can’t afford not to take them seriously, he argues. And besides, some of them may be potential allies, so why alienate them?

 

Yet, even Bybee admits that “the most vociferous and visible protest activity hitting the streets of America has emerged not from those most victimized, but from a stridently right-wing Tea Partywhose base is relatively affluent, well-educated, overwhelmingly white, and racially resentful” in his Z article “Tea Party Poses Threat to Democracy.” The title alone should give one reason for pause when considering the movement’s “good” points. He then quotes Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: “They grew up in families and social clusters where these ideas are considered common sense and what America is all about. Their ideas are based on what they are hearing from inside their 'information silos.'”

 

Those don’t sound like reliable allies to me. Rather, they sound like dangerous reactionaries who have bent history to justify their fundamentalist fervor, and who, at the drop of a hat, would gladly join the rich elite they claim to be petitioning. As long as there are passages from The Revolution™ condoning it (which there are), defecting would not only appear to them to be expedient, but patriotic, honorable, and in-line with the wishes floating endlessly from the graves of the Almighty Founders.

 

Sure, individuals in a movement can’t be held to account for everything that other members say or do, and some of the tenets of the Tea Party movement are well-warranted grievances, but in this case the people saying and doing the most harmful, anti-intellectual, divisive things–the people espousing historical fundamentalism–are the people on the stages with the microphones (whose huge, authoritarian companies are bank-rolling both the events and coverage of them). One doesn’t need a “blood-libel” to poke holes in the leadership’s rhetoric, which even before Tax Day in 2009 was labeling Leftists as treasonous terrorists—a serious offense, if you adhere to the Constitution. This stupidity should make one tread lightly (pun intended) when pointing to the “successes” of the movement.

 

Remember, other groups have been anti-NAFTA (and Palin is so much against NAFTA she couldn’t name the countries joined by the agreement⁷), anti-taxes, and anti-federal-government without also being anti-history. And we should all be especially wary of groups who claim to know the minds of the Founders better than others, and whose leaders establish a priesthood (another pun intended) of The Revolution™, shutting out dissent from within and shunning extensions of discourse from without. The very fact that we generally capitalize “Founders” is troubling enough. Go to the nearest bookshelf, pry out a dictionary, if there is one, and look up the word “cult.”

 

In order to inoculate ourselves from the anti-history of Palin et al., I suggest we stop deifying the founders (in lower case from here on out), who were men of reason and of contradiction, and in the final analysis were mere men (and only men; women didn’t exist in America until 1920), many of whom owned other men, both African and white, even in revolutionary Boston.

 

We would do well to start reading the Constitution for what it is: a document that codifies the hierarchical property and ownership relations of a land-owning elite, but which also contains radical, liberatory ideas that should be defended. It can be both simultaneously, and the discussion of how to shape our contemporary world by advancing or rejecting these ideas should trump any quote from the age of Paine, however elegant.

 

I’ll offer a dissenting version: The fact that in 1794, only 13 years after the Battle of Yorktown, the founders who had opposed British taxes had to mobilize troops to put down a rebellion of farmers in Pennsylvania who rallied against a burdensome tax on whiskey illustrates not just the contradictory hypocrisy of the Revolution, but the speed at which Orwell’s Animal Farm was played out in the new America. Adams’ Sedition Act of 1798 was the nail in the coffin (one can imagine him literally clinking his glass with British royalty in celebration). “Still,” laments Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States, “the mythology around the Founding Fathers [sic] persists.”

 

This mythology plagues us still, via the documents pointed to ad infinitum (and ad nauseam) by Tea Partiers and other “sons of liberty.” It clouds our ability to simply discuss the documents, lest we rouse the angered spirits of dead founders, who, if one listens to Fox News, seem to be perpetually rolling in their graves (except for Paine, whose remains were dug up in 1819 and have since been lost).

 

In order for discussion to even occur, Tea Party members would need to do the unthinkable: admit that the Constitution was not divinely inspired, and is not overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian in origin.⁸ They would need to discontinue treating history like a religion. They would need to put the founders to rest (they must be tired from all that rolling) and, perhaps, accept that other people’s vantage points from which they analyze the stories of our past are just as valid as their own. I can envision no real solidarity between the Tea Party and anyone else without the total abandonment of their historical intolerance. Leftist and anti-capitalist groups ally with the movement at their own risks.

 

Christopher Hitchens points out in the article mentioned at the opening that “the Greek verb historein means ‘to ask questions,’ and was employed by Herodotus, who, often credited with being the first or founding historian, described his work as ‘inquiries,’ or ‘historiai.’” If we saw the study of history as the practice of questioning, as a constant discussion based on the evaluation of evidence, and not, as the Tea Partiers insist, as either holy scripture or a vindication for any action in the present, so long as someone muttered some vague approval for it between 1763 and 1782, then we wouldn’t allow anyone to claim a historical high-ground, moral or otherwise.

 

Endnotes:

1. Lepore, Jill. The Whites of Their Eyes, The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over

American History. Princeton Univerisity Press. Princeton, NJ. 2010

2. Lepore 157

3. Lepore 157

4. McLeroy, Don. “McLeroy: The State Board of Education's standards should make Texans

proud”. Austin American-Statesman. 31 December 2010.

5. Lepore 147

6. When thinking of Beck, I’m reminded of a critique a political philosophy professor of mine

once put forward, claiming that Hobbes’ historical worldview was so contaminated by the official

ideology of the English monarchy that it was, perhaps like the man himself, “nasty, British, and

short.”

7. Graham, Nicholas. “Palin Didn’t Know Africa Is A Continent, Says Fox News Reporter”.

Huffington Post. 5 November 2008.

“What Sarah Palin Didn’t Know, as Reported by Fox’s Carl Cameron”. Los Angeles Times. 5

November 2008.

8. The combination of English feudal common law, Enlightenment values, emerging bourgeois

class interests, Native American political influences (Jerry Mander details the impact of the

Iroquois Confederacy on the founders in his book In the Absence of the Sacred, to cite just

one example), the pioneer wilderness experience, previous philosophical tradition (regrettably,

Hobbes and Locke), and a myriad of other sources all contributed to the documents of the time period.