The Mad Hatter's Tea Party
The Tea Party movement—our latest anti-government fad—uses imagery and slogans derived from our own revolution. But the party goers’ knowledge of history is slight, and their government-bashing oversimplifies America’s past.
The problem is simple: the libertarian zeal that energized people like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry brought disaster to the young nation. So other founders took action. Our first constitution (1781), the Articles of Confederation, was weak, and it was hard to get anything done. Accordingly, founders such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison came to a decision: the Articles had to be scrapped. And many people supported this decision.
In 1787, young John Quincy Adams reflected that the country was “groaning under the intolerable burden of . . . accumulated evils.” The Boston Independent Chronicle proclaimed that “the present crisis is critical in the extreme.” Benjamin Rush observed that “the same enthusiasm now pervades all classes in favor of government that actuated us in favor of liberty in the years 1774 and 1775.” There could be no doubt, wrote Washington, that “we have errors to correct.”
Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention, but he doubted that the product was good enough. “The warmest friends” of the Constitution, he wrote to his nephew in November 1787, “do not contend that it is free from imperfections,” and “if evil is likely to arise there from, the remedy must come hereafter.” In his presidential years, he construed the Constitution broadly to support new initiatives, like a national bank, that he regarded as essential for the nation’s development. In 1794, when Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay a tax on whiskey to help finance his federal program, he suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion. Do the Tea Party sponsors know that?
Other presidents have agreed with Washington that some “big government” is needed: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower (all of them Republicans). Our liberty without a strong foundation is a “temporary truce with chaos,” said Eisenhower.
Our global power is in danger from the Tea Party crew. The libertarian fanaticism that afflicts our political culture now and then—from people down the years as diverse as the John Birchers and the New Left to Tim McVeigh and the militias of the 1990s—is an ideological virus. If successful this November, it could cripple our efforts to recover the mastery that brought the United States superpower status in the years after World War II. There is nothing pre-ordained or guaranteed about superpower status. We could lose it.
If our power should decline, rest assured that our enemies will know it. Our military power cannot subsist for long without proper civilian foundations: good infrastructure, strong productive capacity, abundant purchasing power, full employment.
Eisenhower—who supported extensions of Social Security and launched the Interstate Highway System, the St. Lawrence Seaway, NASA, and space-based reconnaissance—once penned this reflection in his diary: “I think that far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary repudiate it. . . . They are the most ignorant people now living in the United States.”
The Tea Party zealots believe that we are doomed if we spend too much. The reverse is true: we are doomed if these people steer us wrong.