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

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the

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major mainstream media.

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The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she

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Contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a staff writer.

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Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press,

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is called The Whites of Their Eyes, The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American

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History.

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Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article.

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It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion.

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includes tidbits from Lepore's reading in American history and other tidbits from interviews

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she conducted with members of the contemporary Tea Party movement, but it seems never to

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really reach any particular point.

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In the end, it doesn't really end, it just stops.

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She raises some big questions, what was the revolution about, what is history for, who

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are we, but never really answers them.

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If there is any overarching argument to the whites of their eyes, it would seem to be

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this.

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The members of the contemporary Tea Party movement believe, according to Lepore, in

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a version of American history that she dismisses as a fantasy, an 18th century with no slavery,

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poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness or misery, only the Founding Fathers, with their

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white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against

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Taxes and Defending Their Right to Bear Arms.

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This outright fiction, Lepore argues, may, for example, be accused of having compressed

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a quarter century of political contest into the founding, as if ideas worked out over

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decades of debate and fierce disagreement were held by everyone from the start.

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She quotes an exchange between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

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Who's your favorite founder?, Beck asks Palin.

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Um, you know, well, she replies, all of them.

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It is not, of course, clear whether Mrs. Palin actually knows the names of any of these founders

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Beck was asking her about, as it is not clear whether she knows anything else at all about

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them either.

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It is relatively certain, however, that Glenn Beck does know both who the founders were,

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and at least something about what they said and did.

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He has claimed, for example, that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution,

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a not entirely implausible interpretation of the facts.

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The problem, however, at least as Lepore sees it, is that Beck is a devotee of the Tea Party

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movement's version of American history, which she calls not just kooky history, but anti-history.

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Then she decides that perhaps a better term for it is historical fundamentalism.

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Historical Fundamentalism is to history, she writes, what astrology is to astronomy, what

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alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.

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More specifically, historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular

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and quite narrowly defined past, the founding, is ageless and sacred, and to be worshipped.

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that certain historical texts, the founding documents, are to be read in the same spirit

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with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments, that the

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founding fathers were divinely inspired, that the academic study of history, whose standards

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of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism, is a conspiracy, and, furthermore,

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blasphemy, and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents as sacred

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Texts and to the Founding Fathers as Prophets are therefore incontrovertible.

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As Lepore points out, the Founding Fathers weren't even called the Founding Fathers

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until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynote address at the Republican National

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Convention in 1916.

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He used the phrase again a few years later during his inauguration in 1921, in an inaugural

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It was in that very same speech that Harding attested

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his Belief in the Divine Inspiration of the Founding Fathers.

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Lepore provides inconclusive anecdotal evidence, which I nevertheless find persuasive, that

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the Tea Party movement is mainly just a bunch of disaffected Republicans, who really care

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nothing for small government or individual liberty, but merely want to see the GOP back

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in the White House and back in control of Congress.

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For example, she cites a 2010 New York Times CBS News poll as revealing that 63 percent

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of self-described Tea Party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared

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with 23 percent of all adult Americans, and Fox News is of course little more than the

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outsourced publicity arm of the Republican Party.

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She also presents such evidence from her own interviews with members of the Tea Party movement.

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She found that Tea Partiers liked to describe their movement as a catch-all.

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Austin Hess identified himself as a libertarian.

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Kristen Varley described herself as a social and fiscal conservative.

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But it didn't catch everything.

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Opposition to military power didn't have a place in the 21st century Tea Party.

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It did, however, have a place in the revolution.

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Moreover, the commitment to individual liberty exhibited by many of those Lepore talked with was rather scant, to say the least.

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She interviews one tea-partier, Kristen Varley, who is working to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot.

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Lepore asked her whether that didn't amount to more government interference.

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But the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family.

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and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage.

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In other words, I oppose large intrusive government except when I don't.

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Where could you find a better definition of conservatism?

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At another point in her period of interaction with the Tea Partiers, mostly in Boston,

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Lepore asked a self-proclaimed libertarian, Austin Hess,

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if he was troubled by Kristen Varley's work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family.

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We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues, he said.

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Later, I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the Tea Party.

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He shrugged.

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The enemy of my enemy is my friend, he said.

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I don't agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we're not conducting purity tests.

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We're building coalitions.

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Lepore also finds anecdotal evidence of historical ignorance among the contemporary Tea Partiers.

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She talks with a midwesterner named Patrick Humphries, for example, who tells her he was

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born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa.

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Humphries believes, like most of his fellow Tea Partiers, that the policies of the Obama

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administration represent a radical change, a government takeover of the economy.

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But of course, Obama's actual policies are merely the policies all presidential administrations,

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both Republican and Democratic have pursued for nearly 80 years.

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They are virtually indistinguishable from the policies of his predecessor, George W.

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Bush.

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Much of the Tea Party talk about the supposed evil of the Obama administration is really

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just empty rhetorical excess.

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And Lepore does have a tendency to take the contemporary Tea Partiers' somewhat overheated

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rhetoric a bit too literally.

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She seems to think, for example, that they really want to return to the 18th century,

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or to be more exact, to the way government was conducted back then.

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And that is something Lepore herself does not want.

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She tells the sad story of Peter Franklin Mecham, Benjamin Franklin's nephew, the

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son of his sister Jane.

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When Jane's husband, Edward Mecham, died, Lepore writes, he left his wife with nothing

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The care she provided did not, however, meet Jill Lepore's standards.

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Whenever I hear people talk about getting back to what the founders had, she writes,

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a government that won't give money to people who don't work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecham.

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He was tied up in a barn like an animal for the rest of his life.

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Nor does Mecham's case represent the full extent of Lepore's dissatisfaction with the politics of the late 18th century.

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In 18th century America, she writes, I wouldn't have been able to vote.

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I wouldn't have been able to own property either. And her rejection of that prospect is flat and final.

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She writes, I don't want to go back to that. She approvingly quotes Thurgood Marshall's 1987 remark

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in which he mocked what he called the complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and

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compromised in Philadelphia yielded the more perfect union it is said we now enjoy. Marshall

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Still expressed a certain skepticism about the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice

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exhibited by the framers, and noted that the government they devised was defective from

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the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations

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to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual

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rights we hold as fundamental today.

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There is merit in this statement, though a historically literate libertarian would remonstrate

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a bit about Marshall's wording.

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It's doubtful, for example, that a civil war was actually required to get rid of slavery,

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and not all of those constitutional amendments Marshall seemed to hold in such high regard

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were required either, not if the end you had in view was the protection of individual rights.

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The one in 1920 that permitted women to vote was doubtless required for that objective

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to be achieved.

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But what about the provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments that effectively turned over to

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a monstrously enlarged federal government all the matters that had previously been concerns

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of the various states?

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Did this have the effect of better protecting the individual rights of Americans?

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The matter is, at the very least, debatable.

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The important point, however, is that no Tea Partiers I know of are asking that the government

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policies of the late 18th century be adopted anew, that slavery be reinstituted, that women

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be denied the right to vote and the right to own property.

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What the Tea Partiers are asking is rather that our current government be run according

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to the principles that underlay the American Revolution.

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But there's the rub.

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For what are those principles?

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The Founding Fathers didn't agree with each other about everything.

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In fact, the more you read their letters and other writings, the more it seems that they

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agreed with each other about virtually nothing, except the desirability of breaking with England

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and establishing a new government for what had been thirteen separate English colonies.

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This is, presumably, why Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin to name her favorite founder,

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And it was her ignorant belief, or so at least it seems to me, that the founders all agreed,

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that made her unable to answer his question.

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If you think of the American Revolution as most modern libertarians do, as having been

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a major event in the libertarian tradition, as having been underlain by essentially libertarian

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ideas, if what at least some tea partiers want is that our current government be run

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and according to libertarian principles, well then, what they want is a federal government

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that scarcely exists, a federal government closer to the one that operated under the

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Articles of Confederation than to any U.S. federal government that has existed since

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adoption of the Constitution.

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If like most Tea Partiers, however, you're a conservative, then the principles you probably

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believe underlay the American Revolution were no taxation without representation, the

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The Right to Bear Arms, and, of course, the doctrine that the United States was to be

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a Christian nation.

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It is a skewed understanding of the revolution that permits such a view as this, of course,

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which is Lepore's point.

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What today's Tea Partiers think they know about the American Revolution is partial and

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selective when it isn't absolute bunkum.

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Jill Lepore believes, and I agree with her, that it would be better if the Tea Partiers

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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.

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She is inclined to blame her own profession for the problem.

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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.

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She has a point, but I myself am a firm believer in the view that you can lead a horse to water,

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but you can't make it drink.

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The horse has to want a drink.

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The American electorate has to want the truth about American history.

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Too many Americans really don't want truth, any truth.

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What they want is mythology that will confirm their prejudices.

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Those of us who communicate with the public about history do have to get the word out

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about what American history really is, but just doing that won't guarantee a change

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in public attitudes toward the American Revolution.

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We still need a thirsty horse.

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This is Jeff Riggenbach.

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Thank you for watching!