A Brief History…

There is an interesting post today on Powerline from a professor at Hillsdale College. I have attended a couple of Tea Party rallies and am convinced this is a major movement in the country. They were not organized by the Republican Party or Fox News and they are largely libertarian in philosophy. I can’t even recall seeing an anti-abortion sign at one of them. That’s not to say that the attendees are not social conservatives. I just think that financial and tax issues trump all that right now. Here are some of the statements from that piece that particularly struck me.

However, the Guardian, a left wing newspaper in Britain, is alarmed at this phenomenon.

Indeed, to examine the impact of both Palin and Bachmann is to see an America split firmly into two different worlds. The first is a liberal one where such politicians make outlandish comments that become the butt of jokes on the Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. The other is one where Palin and Bachmann are the victims of a liberal media that hates its own country. “For their supporters, attacking Palin and Bachmann actually gives them the proof that they are the victims that they already believe themselves to be,” said Bowler. To the conservative mind-set, these women are truth-tellers who are viciously attacked precisely because of the validity of the message that they are carrying.

Yes, it is alarming. Unfortunately, there is no similar movement in Britain. Instead, Labour voters seem to be joining a real fascist party.

Back in early September, I attended the annual meeting of the American Political Science Convention, which was held — for the first time — outside the United States in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

One of the panels I attended had as its focus the first eight months of the Obama administration and that administration’s prospects. Those on this particular panel were for the most part on the right, and in an utterly sober fashion they discussed the stimulus bill, the likelihood that the Democrats would pass a health care bill, and the prospects of the two parties in the 2010 midterm elections.

I was struck by one thing. No one even mentioned the tea-party movement and the explosions that had taken place at town meetings throughout the country in August.

So I asked why no one had mentioned it, and one political scientist — an exceedingly distinguished and astute student of presidential elections — responded that the tea-party phenomenon was, indeed, strange. It had, he noted, no institutional support. Nothing more was said. That was the beginning and the end of the panel’s discussion of this phenomenon.

Here is a political science meeting by the national association of scholars in this field. There is no mention of the Tea Party movement. Is there a better example of the failure of academic institutions to understand the country ?

He then links to an earlier post on a previous example of a spontaneous mass movement in American history.

In the early 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited Jacksonian America, he was taken aback by much of what he encountered. Nothing impressed him more, however, than the demonstrated capacity of the Americans to form private associations for public purposes.

This phenomenon – illegal in Tocqueville’s France and rare on the continent of Europe, even today – amazed him. He was particularly struck by the political consequences of the Americans’ confident practice of what he called “the art of association.” For, as he discovered, opposition had sprung up to the so-called Tariff of Abominations outside the existing political parties.

This opposition was especially emphatic in the South. But, in a fashion that seemed spontaneous, organizations had been independently formed in every district of the country, and then they had joined together in a great network to bring pressure upon Congress.

Tocqueville did not express an opinion regarding the justice or wisdom of this movement. What interested and excited him was simply its existence. For it proved that, in a great commercial democracy established in an extended territory, civic agency was a genuine possibility. It proved that the residents of the United States of America were citizens, not subjects, and it demonstrated that the condition that he called “soft despotism” was not the only possibility afforded by liberal democracy.

The tariff is explained at the link but it does not mention the Great Awakening, which is often described as religious in nature. The first Great Awakening occurred in colonial times and is thought to have contributed to the Revolution. The Second Great Awakening is still considered to have been religious but it led to the abolition movement and, eventually, to the Civil War. To de Tocqueville, however, the crisis of the tariff was at least a part of the movement. Henry Clay, in an attempt to defeat a protective tariff sponsored by New England manufacturers, added provisions that harmed them as well as the South, which he represented. The resulting Tariff of Abominations was passed and signed by President John Quincy Adams in spite of reservations by all the parties. It led to Adams’ defeat by Jackson in 1828 and to the Nullification Crisis of 1832. There is an interesting parallel between the 1828 tariff, which was signed by Adams in spite of the fact that it hated by almost everyone, punishing both northern manufacturers and southern agriculture, and the present health care bill. The Cap and Trade bill is also widely hated although it has not yet gotten much attention.

What remains remarkable, however, is the fact pointed out by the political scientist mentioned above. The Tea-Party movement lacks institutional support. Back in the early 1990s, when Hillary Clinton announced her proposal for a federal takeover of healthcare, the insurance companies mounted a campaign against it.

This time, the Democrats have squared everything with the special interests. The National Association of Manufacturers quickly climbed on board, eager to free its members from having to provide health care insurance for their members’ employees. The pharmaceutical companies did a deal with Obama aimed at protecting their short-term interests, as did the American Medical Association. The American Association of Retired Persons — which purports to represent the interests of the elderly, but which has business interests of its own — was bought outright, and the same thing can be said with regard to the health insurance companies. The industrial labor unions are similarly on board.

Indeed, everyone appears to have been taken care of . . . except, of course, for the ordinary citizens who will be subject to the new regime. There is no one to stand up for them. The Republican Party lacks the requisite votes, and everyone else has been bought.

This is what makes the comparison so apt. No one is standing up for the people except themselves.

In the circumstances, it is heartening that Americans still know how to stand up for themselves. With continued cooperation from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama, the Tea-Party movement may find itself blazing the trail for a partisan realignment that no one in the Republican Party yet has the wit to imagine.

What the leaders of the latter need to be taught is something akin to the rhetoric articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 — for it nicely summarizes the argument made before almost every major party realignment in our history.

Whether the Republicans will manage to clamber aboard this train before it leaves the station is a question still to be answered.

Tags: Congress, Democrats, economics, politics, Republicans

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 8:08 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.