Sam Tanenhaus: Jefferson’s Tea Party Moment

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

WHATEVER the outcome of the debate on the debt ceiling, everyone seems to agree that it has been one of the most alienating spectacles in recent political history — a peculiarly Beltway form of theater, with much of the public still confused about what exactly is at stake.

But here is a disquieting fact: In one version or another, this conflict, centered on protest against the federal debt, has been going on almost since the beginning of the Republic.

America’s first elected opposition party, the Democratic-Republican Party formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s, promised a “second revolution” whose axioms included “the general principle that payment of debt should take precedence of all other expenditure,” as Henry Adams put it in “History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson,” his monumental study.

The trouble, as Adams noted, was that this principle conflicted with another, “reduction of taxes; and the revenue was not sufficient to satisfy both demands.”...