The Tea Party in History

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about the history of conflicts within political parties, and how those conflicts have shaped the nation as a whole.

BRIAN: More than two weeks into this month’s government shutdown, with negotiations over the debt ceiling stalled and the nation staring down a possible credit default, New York congressman Charles Rangel was interviewed by CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield.

CHARLES RANGEL: This isn’t a question of the House and Senate differing. This is not even a question of Republicans and Democrats differing. This is all about a handful of people, who got elected as Republicans, that want to bring down our government. In the same way they fought as Confederates, they want to bring down the government and reform it.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: Wait a minute, whoa, whoa. I’m sorry, are you likening– and I’m only assuming you’re referring to the Tea Party members, who are pretty intransigent on their views. Are you likening them to Confederates?

CHARLES RANGEL: Well, I can tell you this. If you take a look at the states that they control, take a look at the Dixiecrats. See how they went over to the Republican Party.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: Michele Bachmann is not from Dixie. What are you talking about?

BRIAN: Peter, Ed. I have to tell you, I respect Congressman Rangel. But I don’t think he’s on to a powerful historical analogy. In fact, this might be a case study in false analogies.

Now in fairness to the congressman, he is supported by some pretty fancy publications. I’ve seen columns in the New York Review of Books, I’ve seen columns in The New Yorker that are comparing what’s going on today– a faction within the Republican Party– to some of the same factionalism that led to the Civil War.

But I’m not buying. I think that what we’re watching is the remarkable way in which a relatively small group of Americans has mobilized in a very self-conscious way to capture some seats in the House of Representatives. That is not a Civil War.

ED: And I should point out that they do not call themselves the Confederates or the Neo-Confederates, but rather, the Tea Party. They’re actually trying– a few Confederate flag-waving members of the Tea Party aside– to avoid that kind of association, and to claim something older. So they’re not really waving the flag of the Confederacy. There waving the flag of the revolution itself.

PETER: True enough. But what the patriots did in 1776 was to secede from the British Empire, probably with an activist minority of the Anglo-American population at that time. And there were lots of places where loyalists dominated.

But what’s important about the patriots– and I think this is what the Tea Party is trying to invoke– is a conception of a community, of a nation, coming together in the future. It’s a vision of how one day we’ll all get it. We’ll all understand what’s at stake here. And I think that is what drives this insurgency.

Brian’s exactly right about the leverage you get in day to day politics. But the dream, the vision, is much greater than that. And we dismiss it at our peril because all insurgencies begin with small vanguards, minorities, with an image of what the nation could be.

ED: Interestingly enough, Peter, that brings us back to a way that the analogy of the Confederates and the Tea Party does work. The Confederates at the time did not think that they were backward looking. They thought they were creating a modern nation, based on perpetual bondage that we set at the hub of the international economy.

And as the Confederates created a modern nation, who do they take as their symbol? George Washington. That is the symbol of the Confederacy. So ironically, everybody who wants to move forward also feels that they need to move backward to claim some part of the American legacy.

When you do that, however, you open yourself to critics who are saying, hey, you’re taking the wrong part of the American legacy. And Brian, I think what we’re seeing in the people who are saying, this isn’t the Tea Party. This isn’t the American Revolution. This is the Confederacy that threatened to destroy the United States. You can see how these historical analogies cut both ways.