A dangerous misreading of the Boston Tea

Party from rightwing anarchists

If we must use 18th-century analogies, those who benefit from the Tea Party are more like
British lords than American rebels
Timothy Snyder for the New York Review of Books blog, part of the Guardian Comment
Network
Friday 19 August 2011 23.11 AEST

As Michele Bachmann contends for the Republican nomination, we might ask what her Tea
Party means for her native midwest. In southwestern Ohio, where I was born and raised,
mantras of low taxation and small government have become the way to avoid discussing the
challenges of globalisation. Beneath this region's soothing triple green of maize, soybeans,
and copses of trees is a soil that serves the world. Places like Clinton County, where my
family has lived for two centuries, are the American epicentres of an inspiring but pitiless
global economy. Global competition has made family farming here all but impossible, and
the region's sowing and reaping is now done by combines that are in effect mobile, hightech agricultural factories. The labourers no longer needed in the countryside found work in
these parts with the international courier service DHL, which in the last decade used Clinton
County as its domestic hub. When parent company Deutsche Post suddenly closed DHL's US
domestic operations in 2008, 7,000 men and women lost their jobs.
Clinton County is a good example of what happens when harsh global economics go
unsoftened by policies of national welfare. The county seat, Wilmington, has a population
of only about 12,000. Its businesses had already taken a beating from Wal-Mart, and could
hardly absorb the unemployed. Most of the 7,000 newly jobless had health insurance
through their workplace, and when they lost their jobs, they lost their coverage. Some fell ill
or even died from entirely treatable conditions. For the last two years the headlines of the
Wilmington newspaper have been dominated by stories of basement labs for the production
of methamphetamine, which reporters simply call "meth." In recent weeks this has given
way to news of arrests of heroin dealers. Despite or perhaps because of their struggles, the
farmers and workers of Clinton Country are overwhelmingly Republican.
When I first heard of Ohioans taking part in the "Tea Party" in 2009, I assumed that the
name referred to late-afternoon political networking over scones. The people from my home
state whom I knew to be enthusiastically involved had made their fortunes much earlier,
and were quite rich. When I realised that the reference was to American colonial tax revolts
against Britain of the 1770s, I was dumbstruck. As anyone who went through Ohio's public
schools should know, the American patriots of the day were not protesting against paying
taxes. They were demanding to be represented by the government that taxed them, which is
something quite different. What American patriots opposed was not taxation itself, but
taxation without representation.

Taxation without representation is not exactly a problem for wealthy Americans. They are
represented by their local, state, and federal elected officials. They are also represented by
campaign contributions, lobbies, and personal political access. Their problem, and the
country's, is that they are over-represented, and use their over-representation to ensure
that the wealthy pay lower taxes than they should. If we must resort to analogies from the
18th century, then those who benefit from the Tea Party are not to be to compared to the
American rebels. They are rather the lords of the British parliament, using superior political
power to ensure that those in weaker positions bear the necessary burden of taxes.
Patriots pay their share. To refuse to do so in a moment of need, which is just what the
Republican leadership did during the negotiations over the federal debt ceiling in July, is to
abandon the nation rather than to serve it. The notion that the federal government ought to
be starved of resources is not patriotism: it is rightwing anarchism, which corrodes not only
the American state but the American nation.
America is defined by its middle classes, and these are ceasing to exist. Belonging to the
middle classes means that, without enormous wealth, you do not need to be concerned
about the security of your pension, the quality of your children's education, and the
reliability of your family's health care. At this point few people in Clinton County can say
(despite some good public schools) that they are worried about none of these. The Dayton
and Cincinnati suburbs to the northwest and south-west of Clinton County were once
bastions of the middle classes; today anyone in his right mind who lives in these places is
also worried about at least two and usually all three of these things.
To have the kind of security that the Canadian or European welfare state provides to its
middle classes, my high-school friends in southwestern Ohio would have to earn, by their
own estimation, about $300,000 (182,000) a year. They strive towards this, but naturally
(in most cases, if not quite all) fail to attain it. One high-school friend, a Republican from the
cradle who has never set foot beyond Ohio, told me that he was thinking of emigrating to
Canada. It would be an understatement to say that I never expected to hear this. His
problem was not that he believes that he pays too much in taxes. His problem was a debtceiling deal that, to his mind, spared those who should be paying a lot more .
The Tea Party's attempt to identify with colonial America is easy to mock; but the danger of
mocking midwesterners who like its logic is that they come to seem like exotica. It is hard
not to smile, I'll admit, at farmers who plant genetically-engineered seeds six days a week
and (like Michele Bachmann) deny evolution on the seventh. One church in Clinton County
features a giant pink plastic replica of a horseshoe crab in its garden. Every so often Evel
Knievel's former bodyguard jumps it with a motorcycle. The arthropod is a refugee from the
Creation Museum in Kentucky, where it took up space that was needed for a parking lot.
The crab is supposed to prove that evolution never happened, since its basic form has
remained unchanged.
You don't have to look hard to find the massive zoological change that has visited the area.
Farmers following ploughs used to find trilobites along with Indian arrowheads, and any
visitor to Caesar Creek Nature Preserve can find brachiopods, bryozoa, and horned corals in
its exposed layers of limestone, as I did as a child and as my nieces and nephews did last
week. Clinton County was also home to the outstanding historian of Victorian intellectual
life, Frank Turner, professor and provost at Yale University and director of its libraries.

Among other things, Frank studied the influence of evolutionary theory on society. At
Frank's memorial service at Yale after his untimely death last year, a fellow midwesterner of
his generation recalled the charm and the decline of Wilmington, his hometown. At Frank's
request, the reading at the service was from the "Origin of Species".
As Ohio goes, we say, so goes the nation. It seems to me that we can go either way: adapt, or
thrill to our own destruction. Clinton County has the plastic horseshoe crab, but also the
memory of Frank Turner. Ohio gave the world today's Republican majority leader John
Boehner, but also Benjamin Franklin Wade, the Republican senator who helped draft the
14th Amendment to the Constitution. Wade's provision that the American public debt "shall
not be questioned" has just been violated by Boehner. The Tea Party, in Ohio as throughout
the nation, has found a strategy that is adaptive for itself, if maladaptive for the country: tell
those who suffer from Republican policies that anyone who wishes to help them is an
outsider. This summer I saw, for the first time that I can remember, a confederate flag flying
before an Ohio farmhouse. Radical Republicans like Benjamin Franklin Wade and liberal
Republicans like Frank Turner are pretty much extinct. The Democrats, here as elsewhere,
are forced back into the position of unwilling conservatives, preserving the republic from
the rightwing anarchist view that those who have wealth should not be taxed and that those
who do not should thank the Lord for the chaos that ensues.
What is needed is a truly patriotic position, one that would explain to voters, whatever their
sympathies, that there is no American nation without an American middle class, and no
American middle class without an American government that provides the essential
services that allow people to move up in a globalised world. Whatever one thinks of the Tea
Party's Orwellian references to our revolutionary heritage, there's no danger of a return to
an 18th century: when Ohio did not even exist, and the midwestern economy depended on
the Indian flint arrowheads that today pass beneath the blades of the massive high-tech
combines. The real danger is that we will move briskly forward to national non-existence,
misunderstanding the plainest lessons of our own past along the way. By the time the costs
of rightwing anarchism reach the truly privileged, it will be far too late for everyone else. If
we don't find a way to adapt own national thinking to global reality before then, all we can
look forward to is leaving a trace: like fossils, or arrowheads, or the mammoth tusk that
hangs on my grandmother's porch.
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Topics
Tea Party movement
Ohio
US politics
Michele Bachmann
Boston
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