The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the major mainstream media. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she Contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a staff writer. Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press, is called The Whites of Their Eyes, The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article.

0:46It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion. includes tidbits from Lepore's reading in American history and other tidbits from interviews she conducted with members of the contemporary Tea Party movement, but it seems never to really reach any particular point. In the end, it doesn't really end, it just stops. She raises some big questions, what was the revolution about, what is history for, who are we, but never really answers them. If there is any overarching argument to the whites of their eyes, it would seem to be this. The members of the contemporary Tea Party movement believe, according to Lepore, in a version of American history that she dismisses as a fantasy, an 18th century with no slavery, poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness or misery, only the Founding Fathers, with their white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against Taxes and Defending Their Right to Bear Arms.

1:48This outright fiction, Lepore argues, may, for example, be accused of having compressed a quarter century of political contest into the founding, as if ideas worked out over decades of debate and fierce disagreement were held by everyone from the start. She quotes an exchange between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Who's your favorite founder?, Beck asks Palin. Um, you know, well, she replies, all of them. It is not, of course, clear whether Mrs. Palin actually knows the names of any of these founders Beck was asking her about, as it is not clear whether she knows anything else at all about them either. It is relatively certain, however, that Glenn Beck does know both who the founders were, and at least something about what they said and did.

2:40He has claimed, for example, that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution, a not entirely implausible interpretation of the facts. The problem, however, at least as Lepore sees it, is that Beck is a devotee of the Tea Party movement's version of American history, which she calls not just kooky history, but anti-history. Then she decides that perhaps a better term for it is historical fundamentalism. Historical Fundamentalism is to history, she writes, what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution. More specifically, historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past, the founding, is ageless and sacred, and to be worshipped.

3:36that certain historical texts, the founding documents, are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments, that the founding fathers were divinely inspired, that the academic study of history, whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism, is a conspiracy, and, furthermore, blasphemy, and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents as sacred Texts and to the Founding Fathers as Prophets are therefore incontrovertible. As Lepore points out, the Founding Fathers weren't even called the Founding Fathers until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1916.

4:27He used the phrase again a few years later during his inauguration in 1921, in an inaugural It was in that very same speech that Harding attested his Belief in the Divine Inspiration of the Founding Fathers. Lepore provides inconclusive anecdotal evidence, which I nevertheless find persuasive, that the Tea Party movement is mainly just a bunch of disaffected Republicans, who really care nothing for small government or individual liberty, but merely want to see the GOP back in the White House and back in control of Congress.

5:27For example, she cites a 2010 New York Times CBS News poll as revealing that 63 percent of self-described Tea Party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared with 23 percent of all adult Americans, and Fox News is of course little more than the outsourced publicity arm of the Republican Party. She also presents such evidence from her own interviews with members of the Tea Party movement. She found that Tea Partiers liked to describe their movement as a catch-all. Austin Hess identified himself as a libertarian. Kristen Varley described herself as a social and fiscal conservative. But it didn't catch everything.

6:14Opposition to military power didn't have a place in the 21st century Tea Party. It did, however, have a place in the revolution. Moreover, the commitment to individual liberty exhibited by many of those Lepore talked with was rather scant, to say the least. She interviews one tea-partier, Kristen Varley, who is working to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot. Lepore asked her whether that didn't amount to more government interference. But the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family. and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage. In other words, I oppose large intrusive government except when I don't.

6:59Where could you find a better definition of conservatism? At another point in her period of interaction with the Tea Partiers, mostly in Boston, Lepore asked a self-proclaimed libertarian, Austin Hess, if he was troubled by Kristen Varley's work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family. We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues, he said. Later, I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the Tea Party. He shrugged. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, he said. I don't agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we're not conducting purity tests. We're building coalitions. Lepore also finds anecdotal evidence of historical ignorance among the contemporary Tea Partiers.

7:48She talks with a midwesterner named Patrick Humphries, for example, who tells her he was born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa. Humphries believes, like most of his fellow Tea Partiers, that the policies of the Obama administration represent a radical change, a government takeover of the economy. But of course, Obama's actual policies are merely the policies all presidential administrations, both Republican and Democratic have pursued for nearly 80 years. They are virtually indistinguishable from the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Much of the Tea Party talk about the supposed evil of the Obama administration is really just empty rhetorical excess. And Lepore does have a tendency to take the contemporary Tea Partiers' somewhat overheated rhetoric a bit too literally.

8:40She seems to think, for example, that they really want to return to the 18th century, or to be more exact, to the way government was conducted back then. And that is something Lepore herself does not want. She tells the sad story of Peter Franklin Mecham, Benjamin Franklin's nephew, the son of his sister Jane. When Jane's husband, Edward Mecham, died, Lepore writes, he left his wife with nothing The care she provided did not, however, meet Jill Lepore's standards.

9:28Whenever I hear people talk about getting back to what the founders had, she writes, a government that won't give money to people who don't work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecham. He was tied up in a barn like an animal for the rest of his life. Nor does Mecham's case represent the full extent of Lepore's dissatisfaction with the politics of the late 18th century. In 18th century America, she writes, I wouldn't have been able to vote. I wouldn't have been able to own property either. And her rejection of that prospect is flat and final. She writes, I don't want to go back to that. She approvingly quotes Thurgood Marshall's 1987 remark in which he mocked what he called the complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the more perfect union it is said we now enjoy. Marshall Still expressed a certain skepticism about the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers, and noted that the government they devised was defective from

10:34the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights we hold as fundamental today. There is merit in this statement, though a historically literate libertarian would remonstrate a bit about Marshall's wording. It's doubtful, for example, that a civil war was actually required to get rid of slavery, and not all of those constitutional amendments Marshall seemed to hold in such high regard were required either, not if the end you had in view was the protection of individual rights. The one in 1920 that permitted women to vote was doubtless required for that objective to be achieved.

11:23But what about the provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments that effectively turned over to a monstrously enlarged federal government all the matters that had previously been concerns of the various states? Did this have the effect of better protecting the individual rights of Americans? The matter is, at the very least, debatable. The important point, however, is that no Tea Partiers I know of are asking that the government policies of the late 18th century be adopted anew, that slavery be reinstituted, that women be denied the right to vote and the right to own property. What the Tea Partiers are asking is rather that our current government be run according to the principles that underlay the American Revolution.

12:10But there's the rub. For what are those principles? The Founding Fathers didn't agree with each other about everything. In fact, the more you read their letters and other writings, the more it seems that they agreed with each other about virtually nothing, except the desirability of breaking with England and establishing a new government for what had been thirteen separate English colonies. This is, presumably, why Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin to name her favorite founder, And it was her ignorant belief, or so at least it seems to me, that the founders all agreed, that made her unable to answer his question. If you think of the American Revolution as most modern libertarians do, as having been a major event in the libertarian tradition, as having been underlain by essentially libertarian ideas, if what at least some tea partiers want is that our current government be run and according to libertarian principles, well then, what they want is a federal government that scarcely exists, a federal government closer to the one that operated under the

13:17Articles of Confederation than to any U.S. federal government that has existed since adoption of the Constitution. If like most Tea Partiers, however, you're a conservative, then the principles you probably believe underlay the American Revolution were no taxation without representation, the The Right to Bear Arms, and, of course, the doctrine that the United States was to be a Christian nation. It is a skewed understanding of the revolution that permits such a view as this, of course, which is Lepore's point. What today's Tea Partiers think they know about the American Revolution is partial and selective when it isn't absolute bunkum. Jill Lepore believes, and I agree with her, that it would be better if the Tea Partiers She has got their facts right, so that their understanding of the meaning of the American Revolution was more nuanced and closer to the actual truth.

14:15She is inclined to blame her own profession for the problem. Academic historians stopped writing for the general reader decades ago, she argues, and began turning out highly specialized scholarship that frankly didn't expect any readers other than fellow professors. She has a point, but I myself am a firm believer in the view that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. The horse has to want a drink. The American electorate has to want the truth about American history. Too many Americans really don't want truth, any truth. What they want is mythology that will confirm their prejudices. Those of us who communicate with the public about history do have to get the word out about what American history really is, but just doing that won't guarantee a change in public attitudes toward the American Revolution.

15:11We still need a thirsty horse. This is Jeff Riggenbach.

15:31Thank you for watching!