I’ve been teaching a class this summer, and one of the books I used was Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. One of the infuriating things about the tea party, of course, is their appropriation (and preposterous reinterpretation) of history and our national symbols. Of course, many political movements have seized historical events and patriotic symbols, and used them to legitimize their rhetoric.
But Lepore sees the tea party as something different. They are, in her words, both anti-historical and historical fundamentalists. For them, in Lepore’s words, there is a:
belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past – ‘the founding’ – is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts – ‘the founding documents' – are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for example, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.
The rhetoric about the founders finding health reform and permissive immigration unacceptable, the use of colonial-era and early-American flags, the wearing of the tri-corner hat at rallies, the appropriation of the historical reference to the Boston Tea Party, are all efforts to reposition arguments in this eternal past. The aim is to position every progressive ambition – health care for all, gay marriage, schools that work for minorities – as a blasphemous challenge to the founding documents. And because this positioning is designed to end the argument, it is a very undemocratic view.
As Lepore points out, it doesn’t matter what a President who carried 53 percent of the vote and won 365 electoral votes does, if his actions and the legislation he squeezes through a divided Congress can be shown through rhetorical sleight-of-hand to be in conflict with the wishes of the founders, his actions and his legislation are illegitimate.
Lepore points to one of the major uproars of Barack Obama's first year in office. It is largely forgotten now, because there was nothing to be upset about, even those responsible for the uproar seem aware of that now. In August of 2009, the Department of Education announced that Obama was going to speak to American school children in their classrooms by way of a television broadcast. The right and prominent Republican politicians reacted with outrage, calling it - before it ever happened and before they knew what the president intended to say - an effort at "indoctrination," designed to "spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
What were they really afraid of?
For as long as nation-states have existed, the state has used education to create cultural homogeneity, to teach a shared language, to offer patriotic education, and to sentimentalize our attachment to the nation-state. This is the foundation supporting the entire architecture of the nation.
The tea-party and much of the far-right believe that too many American schools have been captured by "liberals", and are being used to teach, as Glenn Beck views it, a "learn-to-hate-America lunacy."
However, because most school systems across the country are controlled by local school boards, who shape the curricula used in schools, red state children have been safe from this lunacy, secure behind carefully defended curricular fortresses. What Obama's national broadcast was designed to do, the tea party argued, was bypass these locally-guarded curricular battlements, that assured that love of America and the English language were still taught in schools. The reason this mattered so much is because we reproduce ourselves by learning our culture and history. Our children do this in schools. For them to mislearn that history, or have it shaped by liberals who ridicule our traditions, threatens our foundations.
Through the spring and summer of 2009, the Texas Board of Education met to map out history and social science standards for the state's schools. The overwhelmingly conservative board were convinced that liberals had "contaminated" the teaching of history. What the Texas Board produced was this:
'(A)n emphasis on the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.' Thomas Aquinas was added to a list of thinkers who inspired the American Revolution; Thomas Jefferson (who once wrote about a 'wall of separation between Church & State’) was removed. The United States, called, in the old curriculum, a 'democratic society,' was now to be referred to as a 'constitutional republic.' Biblical law was to be studied as an intellectual influence on the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Kids in Texas, who used to study Locke, Hobbes and Montesquieu as thinkers whose ideas informed the nation's founding, would now dispense with Hobbes, in favor of Moses.
The interesting thing to notice about all of this, which Lepore doesn't unpack but leaves us to do, is that these sentiments - resistance to a national curriculum, the sense that the Constitution is a sacred document we cannot interpret, this fear of Hobbes - all reflect an anti-nationalist stance. Tea partiers, while attired in the symbols of our national history, and claiming to speak in our national interest, really despise the machinery and architecture of the nation.
The fact that local boards want to roll back national educational standards, and insert their own, means they oppose exactly the type of educational project that has always guaranteed the preservation of a national culture. Ernest Gellner, the grandfather of scholarly thinking about nations, argued that the modern age was different from all earlier ages. In our age, the state’s monopoly over education is "more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence.” Centralized education creates “the political sociology of the modern world.” With the passing of local village life, as we become an atomized part of an anonymous mass, interchangeable, mobile, living in a vast community, among millions of others we will never directly meet, education becomes the tool to shape our cultural union, fusing us together, sentimentalizing our attachment. Once we shared mutual obligations with those we lived side by side with, our familiarity with one another created our attachment. Now, we exist in a vast social landscape, the boundaries of which extend far beyond our vision. Yet, through a shared educational experience, we learn a common narrative, and are taught that we are joined together in a great social project, one nation navigating the events of history.
Tea partiers and the far right reject the view that the nation is a living entity existing across historical time, preferring to embrace essentialist interpretations that freeze our national development at a point more than 200 years in the past. For everyone else, nations are phenomena of living history. Nations are founded, external enemies attack and are defeated, insurgencies rise up to challenge the nation-state's authority – the Confederacy is a perfect example – great catastrophes are survived, and along the way narratives and social and governmental institutions are rewritten and redesigned, perhaps, as in our case, to become more inclusive. All of this unfolds across historical time.
For Lepore, the veneration of the Constitution and its authors, at least as narrowly imagined by the tea party, is at the heart of the contemporary right’s belief system. And this, in its aggressively anti-historical character, is at odds with the way nations – including our nation – have always been imagined. If nationalism is composed of narratives, and those narratives are a product of, as Ernest Renan said, memory and forgetting, what the tea party seems to believe is that there is nothing worth remembering since 1787, when the Constitution was ratified.
The banning of Thomas Hobbes from the Texas curriculum is especially interesting. Hobbes was the source of the idea that we create states, and surrender much of our autonomy to them, because we want those things that only states can guarantee - principally our security from others who might harm us. It is through the intervention of the state that our lives are preserved, our vulnerabilities lessened. States make it possible for us to live together and engage in commerce, and make progress possible. This is central to the idea of the nation-state. We surrender our autonomy to the state, and the nation-state is entrusted with protecting our community from harm, and preserving it into the future and, in the meantime, we engage in industry and accomplish great things. But the far right believes the state is evil; they celebrate individual freedom, rejecting both the authority of the state and the idea of collective life. But the collective life of the broad horizontal community of the nation, preserved by the state, is the very idea behind nationalism. It has always been central to our own idea of who we are.
Partha Chatterjee, who wrote the influential Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, makes the point that the nation is a modern concept. It requires belief in the modern idea of progress – that history is linear, and cumulative, and that a nation’s history is a record of its great accomplishments and successes and victories, as it marches forward through time. It also requires belief in modern rationality. We come together as a people, and attach our fate to the nation-state as our protector and champion, because we, evaluating our choices rationally, believe it will protect our interests and preserve our accomplishments. We sign up voluntarily. We attached our loyalties to the state, and surrender a bit of our autonomy, because we believe we gain something.
The tea party’s beliefs, then, are regressive, failing to trust in the linear and progressive character of history, and rejecting the idea that we join together as a nation for rational advantages.
Tea partiers are often portrayed as racists, but what does any of this have to do with race? For me, the implication is clear: if blacks were not citizens at the origin of the nation, and we freeze our history at that point, then the historical process that unfolded over the past two hundred and more years, bringing full citizenship to African Americans, is left outside our narrative. It never happened. It isn’t relevant.
Lepore makes an interesting observation, that draws our attention to the ultimate result of this type of historical fundamentalism:
In 1857 , in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court, enslaved to the tyranny of the past, ruled that the framers had considered blacks ‘as beings of inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ That’s what Illinois senator Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln, debated, the next year. ‘I believe that this government was made on the white basis,’ Douglas said. ‘It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.’
For the tea party then, whether they are comfortable saying it as directly as Douglas did, America was a white nation at its origin. And because what matters is that moment of origin – our history stops there – we are still a white nation.
