Uncovering the Tea Party's Radical Roots
tags: Tea Party
For decades, Democrats across the country have been holding Jefferson Day dinners, filling their coffers by honoring their party's founder. Suddenly, along comes the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, snatches up poor old TJ, and says, "Sorry, he's actually ours. After all, didn't he say, 'That government is best which governs least'?"
Well, no, in fact he
didn't. But perhaps he should have. He often expressed skepticism, and
sometimes outright criticism, of the growing powers of the federal government.
So which side in today's political divide is most entitled to carry the name of
Jefferson on its banner? Exploring those questions led me to a surprising
discovery: If we put the Tea Party's claim to TJ's mantle in the proper
historical perspective, we come out not on the far right but on the far left.
It all began when I was re-reading Gordon Wood's The
Radicalism of the American Revolution (trying
to escape from obsessively tracking the DC rollercoaster.) As Wood observes,
the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians divided over basically the same issue that
plagues us now: How much of a role should government play in people's lives?
(Though the clash back then was so fierce, and split American society so
sharply, that it makes today's politics look rather mild by comparison.)
But Wood takes us deeper into the substance of the issue.
Jeffersonians were willing to limit government only because they assumed that
there was "a principle of benevolence ... a moral instinct, a sense of
sympathy, in each human being." They were founding an American nation upon the
European Enlightenment's belief that "there was 'a natural principle of
attraction in man towards man' [as Hume put it], and that these natural
affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together."
This was exactly the point that frightened Alexander Hamilton
most. He summed up his opponents' view quite accurately: "As human nature
shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan,"
based on common moral sense and the spread of affection and benevolence,
government eventually "will become useless, and Society will subsist and
flourish free from its shackles." Then Hamilton, the greatest conservative
of his day, dismissed this vision of shrinking government as "a wild and
fatal scheme."
The Republicans who now
control the House obviously have a very different view of what it means to be a
true conservative. But that doesn't mean they have become Jeffersonians. Not by
any means. In many ways they would be closer to Hamilton, who scorned
Jefferson's trust in human nature.
The Tea Party et al. don't defend their call for less
government by claiming that we are all born with an innate sense of benevolence
and sympathy toward all other people. On the contrary, they claim "the
most sacred right to be left alone"
largely because they don't trust people outside their own familiar circle, so
they don't want those strangers meddling in their affairs.
Yet the current call for less government is a useful
reminder of the worldview on which Jefferson and many of the Founding Fathers expected
to build the United States. They assumed it was "natural to infer, that a
disposition to do good, must, in some degree, be common to all men."
And this, Wood goes on to write, "was the real source
of democratic equality." Every human being can be equally trusted to make
wise decisions for the good of all (the reasoning went) because everyone,
simply by virtue of being human, has a natural concern for the good of all --
as long as that inborn sense of sympathy and benevolence is not corrupted by a
misguided society. Let nature take its course and everyone will be taking care
of everyone else so well that there won't be very much for government to do.
In the mid-19th
century Henry David Thoreau drew that line of thinking out to its logical
conclusion in his essay "Civil
Disobedience":
I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least" -- and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
How would men (and women, to be sure) get prepared for such
anarchy, which was really Thoreau's ideal? He offered no simple rule, because
there was none, in his view: "I would have each one be very careful and
find out his own way." he wrote in Walden.
"Explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s own
being."
Within that private sea of our own being, though, Thoreau
was sure that every one of us could find -- each in our own way -- the eternal,
spiritual "solid bottom," of the universe. "Next to us the
grandest laws ... all the laws of Nature ... are
continually being executed." We can know those laws directly and be guided
by them, as long as we "live deep and suck all the marrow out of life."
Then we will find government superfluous.
Thoreau concluded "Civil Disobedience" by
"imagining a State" that would let a few people
live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
It would be a state of perfect Transcendentalist anarchy,
where everyone would fulfill all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men not
because they were following the government's laws but because they were letting
nature take its course within them, living deep and sucking all the marrow out
of life.
Today's right-wing extremists would probably run from
Thoreau's view of life even faster than from Jefferson's. But there is no
denying that their obsession with shrinking government stands in a long,
distinguished line of American tradition where these two luminaries shine so
bright.
Those same right-wingers would probably run fastest of all
from another luminary, Walt
Whitman, who was surely marching to his own drummer when he rhapsodized
about his own transcendental moments: "From this hour, freedom! From this
hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines." Where the Tea
Party would erect fences stronger and higher, Whitman would have every fence
torn down.
And in his imagined freedom, shorn of all defences, Whitman
found "the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul
is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods."
Even Jefferson could not have expressed the Enlightenment faith in benevolent human
nature more eloquently.
Whitman gave classic voice to the link between the anarchic Transcendentalists
and the Jeffersonians: Live free, follow your natural promptings, and you will
spontaneously act upon the elemental sympathy for all that wells up from within
you.
So it seems a fitting coincidence that I first heard this
tradition voiced by friends at "Leaves of Grass," my local
countercultural bookstore, back in the late 1960s. They summed it up by asking,
in Whitman's words: "What do you need, Camerado? Do you think it is love?",
and answering, in the Beatles' words, "All you need is love."
These friends were imagining something not yet anywhere seen:
a society blending personal freedom and spiritual seeking with universal
sympathy, so that everyone could suck all the marrow out of life. Most of them thought
they were the first to even imagine it. They didn't know that they were only
forging the next link in a historical chain of imagining -- a chain of
political mythmaking -- stretching back to the American Revolution.
As for the size of government, I don't recall it being a
burning issue back then outside a small circle of political philosophy wonks.
For the rest of us, it seemed just a matter of common sense. The innate sense
of sympathy, as well as direct contact with the marrow of life, had been
stunted for far too long by a society that valued profits and material goods above
people. It would be many years before everyone's genuine needs would be fully
met by spontaneous acts of benevolence and love.
Until then, government should fill the gaps, since
only government has the resource to make sure all are filled. But it should
stay out where it does more harm than good -- most obviously, back then, in
Vietnam.
So if we drag the Tea Party and its fellow-travelers (kicking
and screaming, no doubt) back into their proper historical context, we discover
that the size of the government is not the crucial issue at all. They are here
to remind us of something much bigger: a grand mythic vision that appeared at
the very birth of the nation and has remained with us ever since, periodically
blazing up in individuals or groups who have articulated it in clear and
sometimes eloquent words.
So far the spotlight on the Tea Party has done much more to
obscure than illuminate this mythic vision. But history has its way of playing
unexpected tricks on us. Exhibit A: If it weren't for the Tea Party's vehement
opposition, the U.S. would probably be dropping bombs on Syria right now, and
very possibly sinking deeper into prolonged military involvement there.
So let's give thanks where thanks are due, recall the patriotic far right's true roots in America's radical history, do what we can to cultivate those roots, and do what we can to cultivate those roots so that they’ll give rise to a healthier plant in the future.