Hillsdale Prof. Paul Rahe @ Commentary: 'How to Think About the Tea Party'

Commentary ^ | February 2011 | Prof. Paul A. Rahe

[hillsdale1]

On February 19, 2009, when the finance commentator Rick Santelli indulged in a rant against the newly unveiled “stimulus” bill on the CNBC cable network and called for a demonstration in Chicago modeled on the Boston Tea Party, he fired a shot heard round the country. Santelli’s diatribe was focused on the fact that Americans who had played by the rules, had saved much of what they had earned, and had paid their bills on time were being required to bail out fellow citizens who had gotten caught short in purchasing a domicile they could not afford or while speculating in real estate. In the weeks that followed, ordinary citizens spontaneously gathered in towns and cities across the continent to organize Tea Parties in protest against what they took to be an unjust redistribution of wealth from the industrious and the rational to the greedy and improvident.

[capt. norm]

Your link takes me to the proper site, but I can’t find this story there.

[MaryFromMichigan]

Found it here.

[Gargantua]

While dauntingly tomish (for a Sunday morning...), a nontheless exceptional, historically and contemporarily accurate, factual piece. How very refreshingly novel. Also an exceptionally well researched and written composition.

Well worth the time. Note that this is from the perspective of an individual who expresses myriad telltale signs of being an ardent Anglophile. If so, it is significant that such Britain-loving academics are more frequently disposed to sneer at and mock popular uprisings from among the unwashed masses, especially insurgencies comprised of "Yanks." That this well-spoken author sees The Tea Party not only as a good thing, but also a crucially necessary movement given the times, augers well for those of us who support The Tea Party's goals... and candidates.

This Thing is now a force of Nature. The Tea Party and its ethos are now the 900 pound gorilla in the polling booth. I believe that the numbers of current and previous fence-sitters are steadily joining the ranks of Tea Party supporters (which support, by the way, makes one a de-facto Tea Partier).

2012 like a freight train cometh. "Buck up or stay in the truck." Sarah Palin

8^D

[Paladin2]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-to-think-about-the-tea-party/

[loveliberty2]

Excellent!!

The Left's underestimation or trivialization of the potential and power of the Taxed Enough Already citizen movement is foolish and reflects a great lack of understanding on the part of those who do so.

The principles which motivate that movement are consistent with the principles of liberty envisioned and articulated by the "American mind" of 1776, as expressed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

Although the so-called "intellectuals" of the Left would portray them otherwise, these new TEA Party citizens are studying the same words and ideas as motivated that first "American mind," thank to technology. They feel the overeaching power of oppressive government, just as did their forebears, and the ideas of liberty have an appeal that is natural and deep in the human spirit.

Because of the "progressives," for decades, such ideas had been censored from the nation's textbooks, hidden away in remote stacks in libraries, and stifled in public discourse. The Internet has changed their ability to accomplish such widespread censorship, however, and millions of Americans now understand the ideas of liberty, and they will not be silenced.

[Christian4Bush]

bump 3 and 5

[neverdem]

Thank you!

[GVnana]

Consider what Barack Obama and the Democrats did over the past two years—with their so-called stimulus, health-care reform, and reform of financial regulation. Each initiative involved the passage of a bill more than a thousand pages in length that virtually no one voting on could have read, and no one but those who framed it could have understood. Each involved a massive expansion of the federal government and massive payoffs to favored constituencies. And each was part of a much larger project openly pursued by self-styled progressives in the course of the last century and aimed at concentrating in the hands of “a small group” of putative experts “an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.” Without quite knowing whom they are evoking, Tea Partiers are inclined to say, as FDR said in 1936, that if they do not put a stop to what is going on, “for too many of us life” will be “no longer free” and “liberty no longer real”—for otherwise the bureaucratic busybodies ensconced in Washington will deprive us of the means by which to “follow the pursuit of happiness” as we see fit.

The only difference is that FDR’s assertions demonizing the “economic royalists” were demonstrably false, and when the Tea Partiers make comparable claims today, they are, alas, telling the truth.

A classic. Keep this on-hand to answer critics.