Posted on 09/15/2009 9:41:09 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
On September 12, 2009, tens of thousands of Americans gathered at the national mall for a mass rally, itself a culmination of a 7,000 mile bus tour that had started two weeks before in Sacramento, California, to protest the tax and spending policies of the Obama administration.
Participants of the 2009 Tea Party movement, which was organized just before Tax Day this year, took their inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, and not, say, 1776, South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification of 1832, or the Confederacy of 1861-65, because while rebellion against George III was legitimate and even glorious, rebellion against the government of the United States was ostensibly not. But a closer examination of history reveals the incoherence of the intended historical parallel, and the plausibility of the unintended historical parallels.
The Bostonian colonists in 1773 were objecting to the right of a distant legislature, in which they had no representation, to pass laws (in this case the Tea Act of 1773) affecting their livelihoods. “No taxation without representation” isn’t just a line one finds on a Washington, DC bumper sticker, it is an ancient British constitutional principle to which the American colonists were legitimately appealing. In this sense, the Boston Tea Partiers were still operating within the framework and premises of the British constitution and seeking redress for where its application fell short.
This clearly is not the case for modern Tea Partiers. Not only does every single protester in the modern Tea Party movement have a representative and a senator representing him or her in at the federal level, Washington, DC – the analogue to the foreign metropole (from the Greek “metropolis,” meaning “mother country”) that London was – does not even enjoy such representation! While the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the British government from America, the modern Tea Party is a protest against American government from no less than her capital city.
The appropriate historical parallel then, is not 1773, but 1776, 1832 and even 1861-65, when Americans challenged the authority of their own government. That modern Tea Partiers have 1. rallied to the support of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s expression of sympathy to Texans advocating secession during a Tea Party in April; 2. brought their loaded weapons to town-hall meetings about health-care reform during Summer 2009 in a show of defiance to the president; 3. were, as Rush Limbaugh was, “ecstatic” about Representative Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) indecorous outburst in the middle of President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009, suggests that the Tea Party movement intends to strike at the very legitimacy of American government. For what is rebellion but the rejection of deliberation and the turn toward politics by any other means — be it secession, physical interpositioning, or incendiary impudence? And so it is a movement Alexander Hamilton would have scoffed at, but one Thomas Jefferson would have gleefully partook.
The first amendment gives us a right to articulate and seek redress for our grievances against the state, but it is worth stating that there is no first amendment without a constitution, which some of Governor Rick Perry’s constituents appear to be challenging. So on pain of self-contradiction, all Americans must concede that we do not have a constitutional right to revolution. However, this does not mean that we have not inherited a primal instinct to rebel. Revolution is in our blood, because we are the daughters and sons of revolutionaries. Which is why among those rights the Declaration of Independence held “self-evident,” is “that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
On this point, the Declaration of Independence is fundamentally at odds with the US constitution and its claim to a “more perfect union.” No one has successfully exercised this right since 1789, but there are sections in the country who have never stopped believing that such a right is any more inalienable than the fact that all men are created equal.
1773 is an oblique way of referencing 1776, which is itself a way of leapfrogging 1789, the year a federation of sovereign states gave way to a more consolidated federal government, to which, like modern Tea Partiers, the author of the Declaration of Independence would feel considerable antipathy as opposition leader to the Federalists and later president, and to which Publius, in contrast, recommended a measure of “veneration” — a sentiment Representative Joe Wilson could not, in the hallowed walls of the US Capitol, bring himself to possess.
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public.
Yes they are and they know we will be coming after them.
There’s another way that the modern Tea Parties differ from the original — number of participants. The attendance at the 9/12 March on Washington was equal to more than half of the entire population of the 13 colonies in 1773.
Does this fellow really believe that Americans were challenging the authority of their own government in 1776?
In the near future, we’re either going to be laughing about all of this or we’re going be too busy relaoding.
That’s a hard truth that these statists and power-mad monsters - and I do mean monsters - are just beginning to grasp.
I predict that if they really do come to an understanding of what they’re facing, they’ll ‘overturn the game board’. Then it’s an all-in battle for our very lives, our freedom and the freedom of unborn generations.
The below was emailed to me yesterday, showing pictures. I watched the Tea Paety on Cspan2 last night, and an organizer estimated attendance at l.5 million. Bill O’Reilly claimed around 75,000. He is becoming part of the media we now ignore!
I’m sorry I couldn’t paste the pictures.
TURNOUT ESTIMATED (by ABC News) AT 2 MILLION
There is STILL some good left in this Country, and it’s worth fighting for!
These people are there today for YOU and ME, no matter what political party, race or religion!
One of the many black Americans attending and speaking to the crowd,
Mason Weaver declared Obama’s policies as “rope & chains” not “hope & change” and “I thought you’d like to see a black man speak without a teleprompter”
Just one of thousands of Doctors, Nurses, the people who PROVIDE us with health care who traveled to D.C. to protest Obamacare !
Don’t listen to the media when they tell you there were ‘tens of thousands’ marching...there were well over a million! When this photo was shot, streets were closed to attendees who had chartered buses for long trips and aren’t shown. Too bad they didn’t cover this event as well as they did when illegal aliens marched in our streets!
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL, PART 1: (UNDER 8 MINUTES)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1bGBY3BcE
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL, PART 2: (UNDER 8 MINUTES)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ylFTOObbF0
Ha...I didnt make it that far:
Oxford University Press USA ^ | September 15, 2009 | Professor Elvin Lim
In 1773, were not these colonists still subjects of the Crown? In which case they WERE challenging their OWN government.
Ok...I read it...just for confirmation...
The wizard of smart has appearently never heard of the battles of Athens tenn. 1946
http://www.constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen.htm
No, the right to overthrow one's government when the PEOPLE have decided that it no longer represents them is a FUNDAMENTAL right as recognized in our Declaration of Independence.
Just because someone has selected a de jure federal Representative and Senator for me, does not mean I have de facto representation.
When they vote the way they have been, they are NOT representing us!
Correct. They had a "right" to do so based on the God given rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness as articulated in The Declaration of Independence.
This current struggle revolves around the denial of liberty.
First off, protest is even MORE American than apple pie. We've been doing it before the ink was dry on both the Declaration and the Constitution. Dr. Lim, isn't the right to protest in the Constitution itself? Quote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Note that it doesn't say whether or not they already voted, or whether they're already represented in Washington, but simply they have a right to peacefully assemble and petition the government. The moment after an election determines a winner, I have the right to protest about it, what the winner believes, and what agenda they bring. As long as my protest is peaceful, I have such a right and that right is unalienable, and the majority cannot take it away from me without amending the Constitution.
Now Doctor, if you're implying that our protest is violent, then yes, the "movements" of 1776, 1832, or 1861-65 would apply. But the recent Tea Party protests have been the very model of people peaceably assembling. I do believe you're trying to tar with a brush much too wide.
LS: Larry, I invite you to see the rantings of this leftist history professor.
This is true, but they had no representation in the Parliament. The professor makes that distinction in the third paragraph.
My point was that in late 1776, independence had been declared and the Revolution was still in progress, but not yet won. Although we had a Continental Congress, there was no American government in existence yet. That had to wait for independence to be won. So Americans could not revolt against their 'own' government which did not yet exist.
Representation or lack of it has NOTHING to do with our protests!
Do we have the right to start shooting or hanging them? Well, only if we win. But that is not what these protesters are about. They're a bunch of Grand parents, for Goodness sake!
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