On the Wrong Side of the Historical Tea Party
Nothing gets me going quite like Sarah Palin’s idiotic foreign policy pronouncements, so I’m especially glad to see Will Saletan point this out:
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. …
The British hawks, like Palin, saw self-restraint as wimpy and dangerous. If Britain retreated from the tax policies that had provoked the Tea Party, they warned, the colonists would take this as “Proofs of our Weakness, Disunion and Timidity.” Miller writes, “Few Englishmen believed that the mother country could retain its sovereignty if it retreated in the face of such outrage: it was now said upon every side that the colonists must be chastised into submission.”
I could imagine stupider, less enlightening topics to write about than the one Messrs. Saletan and Sessions have chosen, i.e., what lessons we can draw for the contemporary conduct of American foreign affairs from the British imperial experience of the late 18th century. But not many.
— y81 · Apr 19, 04:01 PM · #
I have just finished reading Empire of Liberty a history of the early American republic. Palin’s views on foreign policy and the military have nothing in common with Jefferson and Madison. They thought that having a large peacetime military was a threat to a small government republic. They knew that you could not have a small federal government if a country was frequently at war.
The War of 1812 was fought primarily with militia. The US managed to hold the UK to a stalemate because you do not need a big military when you are fighting a defensive war and the enemy army is from the other side of the world. The US would not need such a huge military if it was used for defense instead of trying to be the world policeman.
— Mercer · Apr 19, 04:11 PM · #
y81 ^^
Yet another example of epistemic closure, or what I like to call Tea Party Myths of the Founders and Framers.
More examples….
That Thomas Jefferson would have seen the Tea Party protests and Jesus-take-the-wheel Palinism as anything but an attempted religious coup of representative government.
That Andy Jackson wouldn’t have shot Beck and Perry and Rush on sight as dirty seditious successionists.
And Jackson would have told Palin to go home and take care of her children…he was a very big family man.
That is why I think the Tea Party is actually a religious movement….it is irrational, anti-scientific, anti-empirical and ahistorical.
— matoko_chan · Apr 19, 04:15 PM · #
y81,
I don’t think the point is comparing military strategies from different centuries, but unpacking the rhetoric of a person who purports to carry the banner of a particular historical event and particular historical figures while embracing a posture radically at odds with all of the above.
— David Sessions · Apr 19, 04:20 PM · #
“the rhetoric of a person who purports to carry the banner of a particular historical event and particular historical figures”
Well, I’ll certainly remember, every time a politician invokes the American Revolution, that said politician is asserting that the geopolitical lessons of the late 18th century bear directly on current issues. Because nothing says “stupid” like inability to confine symbols and metaphors to their proper and intended place and meaning, and I want to be as stupid as Will Saletan.
— y81 · Apr 19, 09:06 PM · #
Would you prefer to be as stupid as Sarah Palin, y81?
— matoko_chan · Apr 19, 09:27 PM · #
y81, the abridged version:
Eighteenth century “lessons” exploited to give intellectual/historical cover to a twenty-first century tantrum over liberal leadership = patriotic.
Eighteenth century “lessons” used as an instructive, if imperfect, analogy to the potential downsides of arrogant foreign policy in the twenty-first century = stupid.
— Lucian Thorr · Apr 19, 10:06 PM · #
y81 is missing the most important point, which is that Ms. Palin is a fucking idiot. This is just more proof.
— Derek Scruggs · Apr 20, 12:36 AM · #
As Lucian has nicely illustrated, y81 is the one who has a problem with metaphors. Palin is mixing historical pablum and 21st century foreign policy as if it all adds up to something coherent. We’re pointing out that even her irrelevant, unrelated historical grabs contradict the arrogant foreign policy she’s trying to champion.
— David Sessions · Apr 20, 02:32 PM · #
None of this is a problem for Sarah; the one thing she does know, is that her audience is as ignorant as she is.
— les · Apr 20, 07:37 PM · #
What about the stupidity of that moron, President Obama, who says that the budgetary process in California is a model for how Washington, D.C. ought to operate. I guess he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know that California has an A- credit rating. HT: Matt Welch.
I’m somehow guessing that Messrs. Saletan and Sessions can see that Obama was engaged in idle political talk, not a sustained discussion of fiscal policy that reveals him to be a moron. But they think that their readers are too dumb to see that the same applies to Gov. Palin. When you have that kind of contempt for your readers, you tend to lose them. Adios.
— y81 · Apr 20, 11:57 PM · #
You should note the distinction between the Tea Party Express/Patriots (the GOP/Palin crowd) from the real grassroots T.E.A. party activists, who ARE demanding a return to the small government, non-interventionist, individual freedom framework our Founders tried to assure. The media focuses only on the E/P because there are “big names” involved in it, instead go attend a small town T.E.A. party rally and see the difference.
— me · Apr 21, 01:04 AM · #