Remember ten years and two months ago?
The world was waiting for the calendar to flip over to 2000; more importantly, we waited to see if the world’s computers would shut down, with drastic results (most of them didn’t).
And as the rest of us celebrated the new Millennium, always on the periphery of things was a thin little film of nerdy, adenoidal pedants clucking away, their voices like Comic Store Guy in “The Simpsons”; “Er, helLO? There was no Year Zero; the Millennium doesn’t begin until 2001″. These people – most of them frustrated wannabe scientists who worked at petty government jobs or as office temps – were largely and justly ignored.
The point? Keep your technicalities; there’s a larger point here. We’ celebrated the end of a thousand years of years beginning with “1” (and, for all of us in IT, the end of the biggest crash preventive maintenance job in IT history, so far).
The other point – the one I’m writing about today? Pedants who huff and phumpher about petty technicalities often miss the forest for the trees.
Such is Jeff Van Wychen at liberal think tank “MN2020”, who recycles the hottest non-story of April 2009 among the lefty clucking classes; he’s T fussing about the purported misuse of history by the “Tea Party” Movement.
An image used by the modern tea party movement shows colonial patriots dressed as American Indians dumping tea off of ships into the Boston harbor in December of 1773. When it comes to selecting a signature event, today’s “tea partiers” have chosen poorly. The tax protests of modern tea partiers have nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party of 1773.
Van Wychen – whose organization exists largely to misappropriate facts for partisan ends – certainly has the textbook story of the Boston Tea Party
The impetus behind the Boston Tea Party was the Tea Act of 1773. In response to colonial outrage, Parliament repealed most of the taxes imposed through the Townshend Act of 1767. However, the hated tax on tea was left in place as a demonstration of Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies. Irate colonists would have none of it. Tea laden ships were not allowed to land in New York and Philadelphia. In Boston, tea was taken from the ships and dumped overboard.
Which caused the good folks at “MA1820” to post handbills sniffing that they weren’t unrepresented, since His Highness George III was charged by Almighty God to represent them.
Well, no, I’m not being especially facetious. We’ll come back to that.
The outrage of the colonists was not about the price that they were forced to pay for tea because of tax; in fact, the price of tea declined in the American colonies as a result of the Tea Act because the East India Company was allowed to directly export tea to the colonies rather than having to go through middlemen in London. The rage of the colonists was not about the amount of the tax; rather, they objected to the principle of any tax imposed upon them by government officials that they had no voice in choosing.
Modern tea partiers can make no such claim of “taxation without representation.”
Maybe, maybe not.
Van Wychen and everyone who chants the “Tea Party is bad history!” meme are wrong for two reasons.
The first: When I accuse Jeff Van Wychen of being a “Wet Blanket” who “doesn’t have a leg to stand on”, and that my response to his point will “knock his socks off” and “drive him up the wall”? What do you see?
Someone reading that could, in theory, read that and wonder if Mr. Van Wychen is an amputee made from soggy wool, and that the impact of my rhetoric will literally leave him barefoot and wedged up against the ceiling. But that someone would have had to have learned English from a 100 year old textbook in the jungles of Burma, because each of those terms has assumed different, non-literal meanings in American English.
So too with “Tea Party”. The Boston Tea Party was indeed a historical event – but the term Tea Party has had an idiomatic meaning, referring to any group of plucky underdogs taking a symbolic stance against big, distant, uncaring government. And until the Tea Party Movement made every leftist in America into a pointillistic historical pedant, even they understood it. And indeed, they do today – but the mission of left-leaning “think” tanks like MN2020 is to try to discredit the opposition. And so it goes.
But just for laughs, let’s hew to the literal, historical story of the Boston Tea Party.
Van Wychen:
At the federal level and in all 50 states, taxes are imposed by elected representatives. You might not have voted for the current officeholders, but you still had the opportunity to vote. Americans and Minnesotans today are taxed with representation. Thus, there is no connection between modern tax protesters and the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor nearly twelve score years ago.
This is reminiscent of Mr. Van Wychen’s colleague John Fitzgerald’s claim last summer that public schools were more accountable than charter schools, because public schools have elected boards. I read that claim, and then compared my own kids’ charter school – where the board responds to 200-odd parents, is mostly turned-over every year, and is the launching point for nobody’s political career – with the Saint Paul School Board, which spends half a billion dollars a year, does a terrible job, and can only be gotten onto with the aid of the Teachers’ Union and the DFL and an awful lot of money. Am I “represented” on the Saint Paul School Board, to which I pay more and more taxes every year? In theory. Am I better-represented there than on my charter’s board? Don’t be an idiot.
Oh, there is an elected Saint Paul School Board. But as a political minority in a one-party town, the only vote that really mattered in the end was my protest vote – pulling my kids out of the Saint Paul Public Schools, forever.
Now, I’ve spoken at two Tea Parties. And the Tea Parties are really quite extraordinary events, gathering people from all political parties, and no political party at all, together with one big thought in mind; get government back under control.
And those people feel like an awful lot of fiscal conservatives felt over the past eight years; the same way we Saint Paul conservative parents feel at school board election time; that we may have an elected official out there sent from our districts who passes all sorts of legislation, but we – the people who favor fiscal responsibility – really aren’t represented at all.
And so we exercise our First Amendment right to protest, to try to change that elected government. And we’re doing it under the banner of an idiom that, let’s be honest, everyone understands. Just as everyone understood that 2000 was the Millennium that everyone really cared about.
And – mirabile dictu – it’s working, or starting to; Democrats are running scared, Mr. Brown is going to Washington and Mr. Christie has gone to Trenton and pretty soon Messrs Reid and Dorgan will be going back to Reno and Bismarck.
Which prompted the Big Left into a paroxysm of juvenile name-calling, and, today, inveigled Jeff Van Wychen to play history teacher.
Modern tea partiers have constitutionally protected free speech rights. Indeed, a fact-based debate over taxation is healthy and should be encouraged
By your leave, my liege. And that is exactly what we are doing!
. However, those who advocate for low taxes and less public investment should not misappropriate historic events that have nothing to do with the cause they espouse.
Have a beer, Jeff. The debate is fact-based, and the Tea Party idiom is perfectly well understood; everyone with an IQ above plant life knows it, just as they knew “Remember Pearl Harbor” meant “shoot Germans and Japanese, build weapons, support the war”, rather than “sit and commemorate”.
Nor should they pretend to be any more patriotic than the rest of us.
I’m not sure if anyone actually has – and I doubt Mr. Van Wychen is, either. I think that’s just become one of those strawmen liberals throw in to make sure we know they’re victims, too.
Craig Westover also tossed Mr. Van Wychen into the rhetorical harbor which, lest Mr. Van Wychen get upset, I hasten to add that I’ve qualified with the term “rhetorical”; Mr. Van Wychen need neither don a Speedo nor find a beach towel.
