“Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.”—
William Saletan (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics)
Yeah, but for her to know that would require a functional knowledge of American history, or at least the willingness to look something up that she doesn’t understand.
No, the problem is that Liberals and Conservatives have both mythologized the Tea Party, and are equally dishonest about its meaning and motives.
The British weren’t foreign invaders (unless you’re a native American) and they were not the evil oppressors of the American good guys- the colonists were mostly British, New England’s population being 75% English. The protest didn’t happen because of excessive taxation: the colonists were hardly taxed at all, and the infamous tax on tea did not stop the tea being so inexpensive that it put Boston’s tea smugglers out of a job. Jefferson’s claim that the British were trying to force the colonists into slavery is utterly laughable; the colonists were themselves slave-owners.
Sorry, but the American colonies just weren’t very important to Britain. The 13 colonies combined produced only a fifth of the income provided by Jamaica. The crown had no desire to fight a long, drawn-out war over a cluster of comparatively insignificant colonies- not with the constant threat from France. US independence was a tiny blow to British prestige, but it didn’t mean anything at all financially.
The reality is that the American Revolution occured when greedy land-grabbers (eager to head out west and slaughter the natives) teamed up with Whig hypocrites who talked freedom one minute and ordered their slaves around the next. I know it’s hard to build a nation around that reality, but that IS the reality. The Tea Party was, then as now, peopled by opportunists and alarmists who grossly over-simplified matters and portrayed their, “enemies” in ludicrously overblown terms.
