Sows Ate My Zoloft
"Antihistory," she writes,"has no patience for ambiguity, self-doubt, and introspection...Political affiliates are, by nature, motley. But what the Tea Party, Beck and Hannity, and the Texas School Board shared was a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the present that was both broadly anti-intellectual and, quite specifically, antihistorical, not least because it defies chronology, the logic of time."
Lepore reported her Tea Party book from the ground, visiting activists at meetings and rallies. In their conversations with her, Lepore recounts, Tea Partiers expressed a set of fears about metastasizing government power and a culture of unlimited bailouts and handouts. Then she tells a story about Benjamin Franklin's mentally ill nephew, who lived out his life in deeply horrible circumstances. Here's how she ties those topics together:
"Whenever I hear people like that nurse from Worcester talk about getting back to what the founders had, which she believes to be a government that won't give money to people who don't work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecom: he was tied up in a barn, like an animal, for the rest of his life. I don't want to go back to that."
I don't want to go back to that. Because this, for sure, is what's at stake in the debate over the Tea Party movement's place in American political life: they want to tie up sick people in barns. Expect Rand Paul to introduce federal legislation on that one the moment he's sworn into office.
Amazingly, Lepore doesn't seem to notice the very fact that she reports: this statement came from a nurse. Who wants to bind the ill in the stables, because the Tea Party wants to go back, and people like this conservative health care professional don't believe in caring for the sick. ("Man, this ICU sucks. I kept telling the nurse I was in unbearable pain, and she just kept telling me to get a job.")
With wonderful irony, Lepore's unshaded conclusions about the intent of Tea Party activists and the motive force that drives their movement have no patience for ambiguity, self-doubt, and introspection. Where have I heard that before?
But much of Lepore's narrative about the unreasoning antihistory of contemporary right-wing politics is built on a false past. Today we have the misfortune to be burdened with the Drudge Report; but oh, friend, it was not so in days of old:
"The old media, or what Edgar Wagner called the 'liberal media,' used to be known as the mainstream media, and its notions of fairness date to the eighteenth century. The elusive pursuit of journalistic objectivity only began in the nineteenth century, but the best eighteenth-century printers had standards, too."
That's why Congress passed the Sedition Act, and why Federalist mobs threw Republican-owned printing presses into the river: they were deeply afraid of all the fairness and balance of the notoriously evenhanded eighteenth-century press. Then came William Randolph Hearst, insert own joke here.
Jill Lepore sounds like Thomas Hutchinson in the 1760s, or John Adams in the 1790s: whither reasonable discourse!?!?
The Tea Party is disappointing, and in many ways ridiculous. I had hoped that their emergence represented a broad and sustainable birth of fiscally conservative libertarianism, suspicious of corporatist government and mindful of the effects of massed power. Sadly, no. (I had also hoped that Tinkerbell would bring me a case of Laphroaig.)
Lepore isn't wrong about the Tea Party movement's use of history, which provokes me to heavy sighing at least once a day. But the antihistory of the insurgent American right is matched, drop for silly drop, by their critics. And this book provides the evidence.