What Tea Partiers Do -- and What They Should Do
I don't see why Tea Party Patriots in Nashville paid Sarah Palin $100,000 for a keynote last week when, for no more than the love of country, they could have honored me, a living witness to the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1973.
I would have told them how I stood boldly that day on Boston's old Congress Street Bridge as the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and Boston 200, a consortium of corporations including the Salada Tea Company, sent costumed National Guardsmen to dump imitation tea chests from a replica of the Beaver, one of three ships that colonial rebels had relieved of their cargo 200 years before.
The chests of 1973 were empty, but demonstrators organized by a "People's Bicentennial Commission" offset the lavish unreality of it all by dumping metal drums from the Beaver to protest big oil companies' complicity in the fuel crisis of that year, whose long gas-station lines I also joined, albeit involuntarily.
That counter-demonstration was choreographed, too. But honestly, now, who was closer in spirit of the tea partiers of 1773 -- the costumed guardsmen and sales staff at Salada's on-site exhibit and gift shop that day, or the counter-demonstrators? I think that today's Tea Partiers know the answer, but that they talk about only half of it.
As Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution (he's mentioned by Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting") told me this week, the original Tea Party was a rebellion not just against a tax but against government favoritism for a global corporation it considered too big to fail.
With 17 million pounds of unsold tea languishing in the East India Company's warehouses as other merchants' teas glutted the market, there were rumors that the British government might even revoke the company's charter and take over its management.
Instead, Parliament granted the company an exclusive license to sell tea; removed all duties; forfeited an annual payment the company had made to the government; and advanced a large loan.
Sound familiar? In 1773, though, all these favors actually lowered the price of tea, underselling as well as excluding Dutch tea smugglers and American tea merchants. No wonder that "Poor Lord North [King George III's prime minister] thought he was doing the colonists a favor" by saving the company from bankruptcy and giving it a monopoly in America, as Wood explains.
A modest tea tax remained, offending colonists' stand against taxation without representation. But Wood -- crediting Benjamin Woods Labaree, the authority on the Boston Tea Party -- notes that "Giving the monopoly was probably more important in arousing the anger of many small New England merchants than the tea tax."
Moreover, the few locals who were licensed to carry the company's tea included relatives of Massachusetts' royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who ordered ships not to accommodate populist pressure by leaving the harbor without first unloading their tea.
"Samuel Adams and his radicals were looking for an issue to exploit," Wood notes, and Hutchinson's nepotism gave them and local merchants the hot button they needed to turn out the men who actually stormed the ships and dumped the tea.
Forgive me for asking, but had I, and not Sarah Palin, been given the podium at Nashville, could I have admonished today's Tea Partiers to dump some of the medicines that are being sold by Big Pharma under the big Bush Administration prescription drug benefit plan, which bars its providers from buying cheaper generic drugs in Canada?
I know that that's awfully radical. But Samuel Adams was too radical for his cousin John Adams, until the Tea Party made John exult, "This is the most magnificent movement of all. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, ... and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history."
Will today's Tea Partiers give us a new epoch of independence? Trolling the Tea Party Patriots' website, I do find scathing mentions of oil companies, bankers, Big Pharma, and their lobbyists - mostly in comments posted by wonderfully sincere, impassioned citizens.
But is Sarah Palin their Sam Adams? Is there a John Adams among the tea partiers' cheerleaders at Rupert Murdoch's global News Corporation? Tea Partiers protest rightly that our government is coddling incompetent and dishonest corporations with taxpayers' money. But will they take direct action against these incompetent and dishonest corporations' control of government? Or will they just wear revolutionary-era costumes?
Addendum: I see that my challenge has also just been posed well by The Nation in an editorial, "Tea Party Hypocrisy." Let's see whether and how the tea partiers answer any of us who are challenging them to show what they're really made of.
Sarah Palin the next Sam Adams? The closest she can get is getting a beer named after her (which I don't doubt isn't too far away...Baracuda Stout anyone?)
But seriously, there is a potential that some of tea party folks may end up going so far right that they find themselves on the left, or at least identifying more with the rhetoric of the progressive politicians than those of the far right Repubs.
February 9, 2010 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Eric Hoffer is smiling in his grave.
February 9, 2010 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
--- Eric Hoffer
February 9, 2010 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, not knowing what TPM readers thing about this guy but... Slavoj Zizek's new book, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, touches on the point you're making.
To try and summarize a rather long section: many people in the (ground level) reactionary tea party right are precisely the kinds of disenfranchised folk that the left and marx have hoped would spearhead progressive and anti-capitalist reforms. Unfortunately their completely legitimate class resentment is misdirected toward minorities, teachers, foreigners, take your pick. On the other hand, plenty of us liberally minded, middle class technocrats are the problem, with our relativly complacency toward american imperial endeavors, capitalist consumption, etc.
The irony is that, it's pretty easy to make a liberal capitalist see the error of their ways and/or push them in the direction of seeking a more economically equitable system, while it's almost impossible to wrench a racist, nativist member of the proletariat out of their paranoic persecution complex.
Anyway, just some thoughts...
February 9, 2010 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wasn't exactly familiar with Slavoj Zizek, but he does seem to be an intriguing fellow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
Your point is well taken regarding taking the "racist, nativist member of the proletariat out of their paranoic persecution complex."
But I think there are some not that far gone, it is similiar to Tin Wis initiative in Canada that worked to have the timber workers, environmentalists, and First Nations to see that they are actually on the same side, and it was the multinational timber corporations that were the common enemy. Some may find their racism and nativism isn't as deep rooted when confronted with an awareness about the nature of the corporate entity.
February 9, 2010 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are a couple of problems with the logic.
First, being working class is no guarantee of intelligence or insight. Marx thought that the objective conditions of the working class under capitalism would facilitate the emergence of a universalist radical consciousness. He didn't think it would be easy, and although he occasionally imagined it as inevitable, in his more soberer moments, he, and certainly his smarter followers, understood that it won't be easy at all, but would depend on a hard struggle against other potential tendencies.
As a matter of fact, things did happen as Marx expected it. We had strong universalist communist/socialist parties and movements pretty much everywhere in capitalist countries in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, these movements were defeated.
We don't have that now, and that is not because the working class is stupid, but because it no longer exists in the West under the same conditions. The conditions that Marx identified as the conduit for a radical universalist consciousness was the factory town, with all people working together in large masses at the same factories, depending on each other and on communal organizations for survival, and sharing a culture and a lifestyle that is distinctly working class.
These conditions still exist in the third world, but in the West, workers have become "employees", each working in a specialized, segregated work environment, isolated, and connected to other workers not through a community and common culture but through "culture" as a commodity that one consumes through mass media. This "employee class" has no consciousness of itself as a class of people sharing a real difference, but sees itself as members of an amorphous and homogenous "people," a category which is mass manufactured, mediated, commodified and sold to them by highly paid professionals. The "people," unlike the working class, is not a category of personal experience, but a identity that one consumes by listening to radio and watching TV. "we the people" never meet each other, never depend on each other as "people," and therefore the only way we can come together as "the people" is through right-wing (or fake left-wing) manufactured threats, foreigners, aliens, etc., that are mediated by "national" organizations, such as the political class and the media.
This option, leading to right-wing nativism, was always there, present with the emergence of mass media and national, "imagined communities," manufactured by the bourgeois intellectuals for popular consumption. It was a constant threat to working class organizing. But in previous eras it was concentrated mostly outside of the industrial working class, in the "petty bourgeoisie", i.e. those who were as poor or almost as poor as workers but whose working conditions did not create communities. These were the social base for the great reactionary movements of the previous century. And they won. That's unfortunately real history. The good guys don't always win. One aspect of their victory is that almost all workers in the West are "petty bourgeois" today. The exception are immigrant communities and minorities, and it is not surprising that these communities are today almost the only source of real radical organizing.
Second, it's not at all easy to make a liberal capitalist "see the error of their ways and/or push them in the direction of seeking a more economically equitable system". It is easy to make them feel a little guilty and support some organized charity, but that's about all. When push comes to shove, most liberal professional side with the ruling class because they are afraid of the lower classes more than they hate the ruling class. Indeed, a great deal of what consists of liberal "enlightenment" is identity politics, in other words, snobbery.
right wing populists can learn and develop. It takes two things. Dedicated organizers who come to help and not only to lecture, and catastrophic conditions that force people to rely on each other and not on the mass media for community. I have no doubt capitalism will create these catastrophic conditions one way or the other. Whether we will have the dedicated organizers remains to be seen.
February 9, 2010 11:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Links: "imagined communities" and evildoer's ethnies -- that is, "immigrant communities and minorities."
February 10, 2010 9:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
In fact, the second term, as far as I see it as useful and in opposition to mediated "peoplehood", is rooted in the US in actual shared differential experience, not in common origin, etc.
February 10, 2010 9:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that the argument I presented is simplistic. After I wrote it I disagreed with myself on the "pretty easy" wording. The word guilt you used is more of what I was thinking.
While I don't want to put words in the author's mouth, I would say that a part of the book also speaks to what your mentioning about the type and closeness of labor conditions being important to facilitating reforms. Zizek's book examines the American fantasy that the "Real economy" is that of manual labor, industry, at home production, etc. What's not discussed by either the contemporary left or right is that the 2008 recession evidences the "real economy" actual political and economic movers and shakers have been working towards: frictionless transactions of stocks, IT, services, property rights, etc.
To speak to your comments about people being stupid: that's absolutely correct, the average citizen who's property taxes are going through the roof because a bunch of rich IT folks move to their neighborhood for the school system, probably doesn't have the foggiest notion about the economic and legal apparatus working behind the scenes, pushing him out of his home.
February 10, 2010 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
"And they won. That's unfortunately real history. The good guys don't always win."
How did they win? How was it they were able to win?
February 10, 2010 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sarah's supporters know she's ready.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsyS0oHLNFA
February 9, 2010 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
could I have admonished today's Tea Partiers to dump medicines sold by Big Pharma under the big Bush Administration prescription drug benefit plan that bars its providers from buying cheaper generic drugs in Canada?
The short version of the original Boston Tea Party was that American tea bootleggers and tea tax cheats would be put out of business when the King's tax was suspended, which it was and the illegal bootleggers couldn't beat the new untaxed official price, therefore they wanted to dump the cheap tea in the harbor.
A valid comparison would be the US giving Canadian suppliers the right to sell duty free in the US and Big Pharma would be dumping the Canadian drugs in the harbor.
February 9, 2010 7:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno, this strikes me a homo economicus logic at the expense of history. Lord North's government coddled the East India Company because it was a British company, too big to fail, with 17 million pounds of tea rotting in London warehouses. What is your reason for even imagining that the US government would privilege Canadian suppliers rather than American Big Pharma firms, some of whose principals may even have been close to Bush Administration officials, by donation if not blood?
Anyway, the tax on tea was retained, not suspended, and, even so, it was the many concessions and privileges given to the East India Company that dropped the price of EIC tea to a level that the colonial merchants and Dutch smugglers couldn't meet. That example of crony capitalism is what got them really angry, according to the sources I mention.
February 9, 2010 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't imagine the US gov't would let Canada drugs undercut US prices.
However the irony is that the tea that was dumped in Boston harbor was not dumped because it was taxed and too expensive but because it was inexpensive, and although business competitors would suffer the cheap prices would bave benefited consumers of tea in New England.
The Boston tea partiers were denying cheap tea to the public in order to protect their own profits.
February 9, 2010 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
How do you know this? What is the basis for your judgment that boosting local profits was Samuel Adams' main motivation? His record as an organizer of protests at that point suggests otherwise, and so did most of the protests themselves.
There is certainly plenty of precedent for merchants co-opting populist sentiments for their own purposes -- as Rupert Murdoch's Fox News is trying to do with the Tea partiers -- and some on the left see most of the American Revolution in that light. I think that while there is some truth to that view, especially in some instances more than others, basically it's too reductionist, too ideologically driven, to explain what actually drove the revolution and how it unfolded.
February 10, 2010 3:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
wikipedia
February 10, 2010 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, most of the issues leading to the Revolution were economic, either unfairness complaints, or failure to actually provide government services like policing the frontier, while still collecting various taxes. The Declaration says we have the right to constitute a new government, because the existing one is corrupt, not because we want to be an anarchy. I like the first three charges:
....He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
....He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
....He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
We wanted to limit a government's power to override law, not to prevent the government from governing.
February 9, 2010 10:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
How ironic?
The people of today's tea party protests on average are about the same age as the 1973 Hippies that advocated violent revolution in Boston that day. Yet, the left criticize today's protesters as violent or advocating violence and fascisim.
So you would stand up for free and tell us about what the original tea parties stood for by way of the philosophy of the People's Bicentenniel Commision? Jeremy Rifkin's group is a hilarious caricature of the ignorant protests by young mind altered economic imbeciles. The PBC called for a violent overthrow of the US government. They comandeered and misinterpreted colonial documents to justify calls for violence while at the same time claiming a closer kinship to Jesus as protectors of love as they committed acts of vandalism, assault, and harrasment. Media coverage at the time reported that a majority of participants at their rallies were so wasted they were passed out cold within the first hour. These guys were young trouble makers looking for a place to get high, get off and get some kicks from trashing a legitimate celebration of our heritage.
It is ironic that this same generation that is now grown up, has a better understanding of our founders, a better understanding of the dangers of big government, excessive taxation and that excessive deficit spending is taxation without representation. I would actually like to see the PBC leftists stand before the current tea party boomers and use their old "Just read the Declaration of independence and replace the word 'politics' with 'economic' " argument. They would laugh so hard they would be passed out cold from hyperventilation.
The fact is these people, like our founders are more afraid of big government than of big corporations or any other private sector entity.
Another strange irony. What did Rifkin's anti-corporate scare tactics have to do with the 1973 oil crisis. It was too much government intervention in markets and Nixon's continuation of LBJ keynsian deficit spending that setup the crash and then the oil shock pushed the economy over the edge for a decade until Reagan turned it around. That is the model for today as far as the tea party folks are concerned.
How strange it is that we were dependent on foreign oil in 1973 and the solution was to restrict oil companies, tax domestic fuel production (Which Obama just hiked again) and criminalize offshore drilling, which is far safer than shipping oil into port on tankers. So we remained dependent on foreign oil and when the economy was struggling in 2008, along with record setting deficits under a new Democrat congress, the introduction of $5 gas helped push the economy over the edge. Was that Chevron that did that or OPEC or government control, just like the government control that forced East India to double tax in London which made it financially vulnerable to unstable governments in the Middle East and the famine in the Asian subcontinent.
East India should have been left alone before the tea act and after.
The Townsend acts were not much different than the Stimulus package. Taking from local colonists to fund the salaries of british governenors and ministers on colonial soil that did not represent the local will. It was an indifference to local private sector economics and primarily focused on control and obedience to a central authority. Just as today the stimulus is designed to prop up government agencies and government jobs and neglect the private sector. The Private sector loses jobs every month and the government increases government run jobs with higher taxes paid by people who can't afford them.
Nowadays when polls show that the people oppose Stimulus, the Democrats characterize them as a rabble that should be dealt with. Town Hall meetings which are a colonial form of political government and free speech were referred to as Nazi rallies by Democrats.
The Tea act, the Boston Port act and other acts in the early 1770s were not meant to appeal to the wishes of the people, but to punish them and make examples of them. Just as nowadays, the President's three biggest issues, The Economy, the Deficit, and Health are each opposed by over 60% of the people polled, yet he continues to push on with policies the people don't want. He has a 44% approval rating. No modern President has sunk so low at this point in his Presidency.
The better analogy of the monopoly that you speak of is Obama policies. The PM in 1773 tried to convince colonists he was fixing a previous issue with the tea act, which would lower overall costs in the short run in exchange for a british central government expansion of authority over the colonies, which is what the Townsend acts were all about. The people were suspicious of the promise of lower costs and believed it was a short term cost savings that would go back up as soon as they forfeited their power. Just as today, some argued to trust the central government but after the previous decade of broken promises, most colonists didn't buy it. Just as today, many argue that we just trust the Democrats on what tea party folks believe is ultimately a monopoly on healthcare. They don't trust the Democrats and they don't trust government bureaucrats to run it. You can call them stupid or you can ask why they have lost trust. Could it be the secretiveness and the double talk and the back door deals with big pharma, Landreua, Nelson, etc. The colonists did not trust the deal PM North was selling them.
This was followed by the intolerable acts. Just as today, they were not meant to do the people's will, they were meant to circumvent their will. The Parliament were astonished at the insolence. They gave speeches that we did not appreciate the generousity of the Tea act, when in actuality, in private their main impetus was not lowering the cost of tea, it was forced submission and government control. It was the consolidation of political power and the subjugation of the people who desired a government closer to the people that responded to their wishes, not a one size fits all.
The answer that they know is not the one you are thinking of. You think they would be in awe of Jeremy Rifkin's 1973 revolutionary anti-capitalist message. They would actually think it is a parody which would draw huge laughs. In fact, I think even the leftists here would find his 1973 ideas, quaint, well meaning, naive and kind of cute in their dated Revolutionary hippy lingo.
They would be more likely to respond to Adam Smith or Minister Edmund Burke's arguments against the numerous acts and punishments againt the colonists here:
Another strange Irony. The PBC rallies often included people enthusiastically waving giant yellow flags that read "Don't tread on me" and signs that said "Question authority". The now gray haired members of the tea party movement also wave the same flags and often quote the same phrase. If anyone on the left is furious and frustrated by these protests, it must be a kind of "protest envy", because they are passionate and they are not going away. Just as Burke warned Parliament in 1774. Get used to it, you can't buy them off, they aren't going anywhere.
The media desperately wants to find the "King" of the movement or the "real power" behind the movement so they can lampoon them personally or show some sort of profit motive or allegiance to an ancient hostile force. The real interesting thing about it is that it is a movement. It is huge. In the millions. They are motivated enough to mobilize. The only ancient force they show allegiance to are the same forces our founders believed in in 1773.
February 9, 2010 11:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
TJ You presented a very good argument
Especially this from Burke
"They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body of men will be argued into slavery."
I beleive our government destroyed the housing asset purposely.
How dare the colonists have another currency.
February 10, 2010 4:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
the government control that forced East India to double tax in London which made it financially vulnerable to unstable governments in the Middle East and the famine in the Asian subcontinent.
East India should have been left alone before the tea act and after.
That was the problem. The British government did leave the EIC alone in the 1760s and early 1770s while it drove itself into bankruptcy with its predatory and exploitative policies in Bengal (that's how the word "loot" got into the English language!). Then HM's government had to bail out John Company because it was, as we say in these more enlightened times, too big to fail.
The underlying problem was that the EIC--originally designed as an overseas trading company--was starting to exercise governmental functions on the Indian subcontinent which were no longer compatible with its corporate structure or corporate ethic. After the fiasco of the early 1770s, the only solution--aside from getting out of India--was greater government supervision. It would take another near-catastrophe--the Indian Mutiny in 1857--before the Company was finally replaced with Crown rule over India. Leaving the Company alone was simply not an option.
February 10, 2010 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
the government control that forced East India to double tax in London which made it financially vulnerable to unstable governments in the Middle East and the famine in the Asian subcontinent.
East India should have been left alone before the tea act and after.
That was the problem. The British government did leave the EIC alone in the 1760s and early 1770s while it drove itself into bankruptcy with its predatory and exploitative policies in Bengal (that's how the word "loot" got into the English language!). Then HM's government had to bail out John Company because it was, as we say in these more enlightened times, too big to fail.
The underlying problem was that the EIC--originally designed as an overseas trading company--was starting to exercise governmental functions on the Indian subcontinent which were no longer compatible with its corporate structure or corporate ethic. After the fiasco of the early 1770s, the only solution--aside from getting out of India--was greater government supervision. It would take another near-catastrophe--the Indian Mutiny in 1857--before the Company was finally replaced with Crown rule over India. Leaving the Company alone was simply not an option.
February 10, 2010 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
You make some very good points on this particular quote. When I said they should have been left alone before and after I was referring to the notion of taxation and over-regulation of the industry. The debate in the early 1770s was over EIC's taxation upon leaving india, upon arriving in London, and upon arriving in the colonies and in some cases a tax in London whether they docked in London or not.
The exorbitant taxes were as usual government officials skimming as much as possible, so they in essence became the EIC's piggy bank, their back stop, their FDIC. Then when externals threatened bankruptcy, they went to their piggy bank.
That was my point, regarding excessive government intervention which applies to contemporary examples as well. It is a common and ageless arrangement, a government basically creates a protection racket with a corporation. The corporation agrees to give up some freedom and the government becomes its insurance and its muscle. The government gets a stipend for its efforts. This was the distasteful aspect of the Kelo decision... Government crushing poor folks on behalf of tax paying developers.
You are right in demonstrating that there were more complex issues going on with EIC. They basically had their own armies of freebooters and if we carry the protection racket Mafia analogy further, it would be as if a mob boss coerced a local business to pay protection money, then the company starts doing enforcement operations for the mob boss until the subsidiary gets large enough that the parent fears a loss of control of the subsidiary. Skimming and regulating then becomes a form of monitoring control.
In the Elizabethean period when the English had small standing armies, freebooters and pirates were a way of contracting out hired mercenaries to harrass th Spanish galleons and enrich the treasury. As you pointed out, by mid 19th century, the British Empire had the standing armies that eliminated the need for freebooters and proxy trading companies.
The above example you gave of the incestuous relationship between the EIC and the Parliament would be argued by the left as an example how corporations control government and by the right as an example of how corrupt government officials can shakedown corporations for personal gain and an unnecessary public risk. My argument was that a law abiding company that becomes overly regulated and taxed will become more vulnerable to a crisis that results in government bailout. The government is like a pusher who needs to keep his customers alive, addicted and dependent.
Thanks for the good points. Any links would be appreciated.
February 10, 2010 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The media desperately wants to find the "King" of the movement or the "real power" behind the movement so they can lampoon them personally or show some sort of profit motive or allegiance to an ancient hostile force. The real interesting thing about it is that it is a movement. It is huge. In the millions. They are motivated enough to mobilize. The only ancient force they show allegiance to are the same forces our founders believed in in 1773. car transport.
May 4, 2011 2:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think there are some not that far gone, it is similiar to Tin Wis initiative in Canada that worked to have the timber workers, environmentalists, and First Nations to see that they are actually on the same side, and it was the multinational timber corporations that were the common enemy. Some may find their racism and nativism isn't as deep rooted when confronted with an awareness about the nature of the corporate entity. car transport.
May 4, 2011 2:31 AM | Reply | Permalink