http://www.salon.com/news/tea_parties/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/09/21/lind_tea_party_whiskey_rebellionThe right picked the wrong historical analogy
The real parallel to today's conservative backlash isn't the Boston Tea Party. It's the Whiskey Rebellion
By Michael Lind
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In another, even more important respect, the Tea Party resembles the Whiskey Rebellion rather than the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was the beginning of a genuine popular revolution whose purpose was not to oppose government as such, but to transfer government from unelected rulers in Britain to elected representatives in the U.S. Once that transfer had taken place, the federal and state governments had the right to impose taxes, even stupid and counterproductive taxes, which Americans were free to protest against -- but only by means short of violence. George Washington was perfectly consistent in leading the revolution against illegitimate British authority and later taking to the saddle again, as president, to assert the legitimate authority of the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion.
From the Whiskey Rebels to the Confederates to the Tea Party movement, there has been a minority tradition that viewed the American Revolution as a rebellion against government as such, rather than as a revolution on behalf of popular government. And
from Thomas Jefferson to Newt Gingrich, crafty demagogues, when they are out of power, have portrayed the elected representatives of the American people as a tyrannical, alien force, only to exercise the full powers of the government without apology once they have successfully ridden paranoia to power.Claims that the nation is about to be crushed by runaway debt have been part of the demagogic tradition, ever since Jefferson battled Hamilton while both served in the administration of Washington. Hamilton was confident that economic growth would permit the U.S. to pay down the consolidated federal and state debts that the anti-statists of his day found so horrifying. He told his friend and mentor, the financier Robert Morris: "Speaking within moderate bounds, our population will be doubled in thirty years; there will be a confluence of emigration from all parts of the world, our commerce will have a proportionate progress and of course our wealth and capacity for revenue. It will be a matter of choice if we are not out of debt in twenty years, without at all encumbering the people." History proved him right.
The deficit hysterics of Hamilton’s day were wrong about the national debt then, and their demagogic, fear-mongering political descendants in the present day are just as wrong to suggest that debt is an imminent threat to the nation.While pursuing negotiations with the Whiskey Rebels, President Washington put on his uniform and reviewed the troops assembled at Fort Cumberland, Md., in case they were needed. The violence of the Tea Party to date has been purely rhetorical. Its members will maul, not individual tax collectors, but the tax code, if the movement succeeds in sending even more intransigent reactionaries to the already paralyzed Congress and the Senate in this fall’s midterm elections.
They can gum up the works, but that is all they can do. Like the Whiskey Rebels of the 1970s, the misnamed Tea Partiers do not understand their own interests and have no plausible alternative program for the nation. They may pose as revolutionaries, but they are only a mob.
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