by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The Tea Party
movement has perpetuated a lot of dangerous and silly myths about American
history in its leaders’ and members’ attempts to advance themselves as the only
true defenders of America’s Constitution. Some of the earliest Tea Party
leaders even said that the original United States Constitution of 1789 was
“divinely inspired” — an idea which would have dumbfounded most of the people
who wrote it, who were Deists (believers in God but not in an interventionist God that takes an ongoing role
in human affairs) — and, by implication, that the amendments that have been
made to it since are not only objectionable but attacks on the divine plan. The
Tea Party has largely adopted the position of its coalition partners in the
radical Christian Right that the opening words of the First Amendment — “Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof” — were not
a guarantee of religious freedom for non-Christians but simply a statement that
no one branch of Christianity could ever be the “official religion” of the
United States the way Roman Catholicism is in Italy or Anglicanism is in Great
Britain.
Though claiming
a reverence for the Constitution as a whole, the Tea Party has been fiercely
critical of a good deal of it — particularly the birthright citizenship
provision of the Fourteenth Amendment (“All persons born or
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”) and the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, which respectively allowed the federal
government to collect income taxes and moved the election of U.S. Senators from
the state legislatures to the people at the polls. Indeed, it’s hard to say
whether the “divine inspiration” the Tea Partiers claim for the Constitution of
1789 extends to the Bill of Rights, approved two years later, since aside from
the Second (the right to bear arms) and the Tenth (federalism and state’s
rights) Amendments, they don’t appear that enthralled by the Bill of Rights —
particularly the ones guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures,” due process for those accused of crimes and a ban on “cruel and
unusual punishments.”
But there’s one
aspect of the U.S. Constitution that the Tea Party is right about, at least in
regards to the framers’ original intentions. The Constitution really does make this country a republic, not a democracy, and
the form of government it sets up is intended, among other things, to protect
the rights and properties of the elites — who today are being called “the 1
percent” — from attempts by the majority to distribute wealth and income more
equally. You don’t have to take the word of the Tea Partiers for that; it’s
clearly articulated in Federalist
#10, probably the most oft-cited of the Federalist Papers written in 1787 as part of the campaign to get
enough states to ratify the Constitution so it could take effect. Though three
people wrote the Federalist Papers
— Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay — #10 was written by Madison,
who quite literally knew more about the Constitution and the “original intent”
of its framers than anyone else.
Not only did
Madison actually write most of the Constitution himself, but during the
Constitutional Convention he also took the notes that are our only primary
source for what went on inside it and how the various disputes over what the
Constitution should say were resolved. Sometimes Madison’s notes have been used
for progressive purposes — as when they were cited as the Supreme Court’s
authority for striking down states’ attempts to impose term limits on
Congressmembers. But there’s little comfort for progressives in what Madison
had to say in Federalist #10. Madison
made clear that the Founders had no intention of making the U.S. a democracy —
even though “democracy” is the word generally (and incorrectly) used to
describe our form of government. Instead, this country was to be a
representative republic which would, in Madison’s words, “refine and enlarge
the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of
citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and
whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to
temporary or partial considerations.”
What that meant
in practice was a system in which the electorate would not get a chance to vote
directly for any office higher than their own member of the House of
Representatives. Senators would be chosen indirectly, by state legislators, and
the President would be picked by an Electoral College whose members could be
selected any way the state legislature chose. What’s more, the pool of
potential voters would be considerably smaller than what we’re used to now. At
the time the Constitution was enacted, the states restricted the franchise to
owners of “property” — which in 18th Century-speak meant land. It
took centuries of struggle before that limited franchise was actually extended.
The populist movements of the 1820’s that gave rise to the presidency of Andrew
Jackson and the modern Democratic Party struck down the “property” requirement
and essentially won the vote for all white males.
People of color
didn’t theoretically get the vote until 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was
passed — and over the next 30 years a campaign of terror and intimidation waged
largely by white-supremacist Southern Democratic politicians and their
paramilitary arm, the Ku Klux Klan, effectively abolished the African-American
vote until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And, of course, over
half the American population remained disenfranchised until 1920, when after
decades of struggle women won the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. (In a
few states some people of color could
vote before 1870, and women before 1920.)
This history is
important in understanding and dealing with the Tea Party because it highlights
how profoundly reactionary a movement it really is — and how elitist it is,
despite its periodic claims to be populist and anti-corporate. The Tea Party is
the latest in a series of Right-wing movements aimed at nothing less than
reversing virtually all the gains progressives have struggled for over the last
two and one-half centuries of American history and returning to the original
understanding of the Constitution: a limited franchise comprised exclusively of
affluent people who in any case were not given direct authority to vote on the
highest offices in the land.
During the
1980’s and early 1990’s it was a common complaint on the Left that the Right of
the day wanted to return us to the values and mores of the 1950’s, when Blacks
were still on the back of the bus, women were still in the kitchen and Queers
were still in the closet. Then it began to occur to people on the Right that
there were some aspects of the 1950’s that didn’t fit their world view — like the upper bracket of the income tax, which
was 91 percent (although almost nobody actually paid that much), and the
percentage of workers in labor unions: one-third, higher than at any time
before or since. So starting with the Republican takeover of Congress in the
1994 elections — after which talk-show host Roger Hedgecock said the new
Congress would “undo the mistakes of the last 60 years” (i.e., go back to a
pre-New Deal economy and society) — they proclaimed an intent to go even
further back: to the 1880’s, before Social Security, unemployment insurance,
laws protecting workers’ health and safety, to a time idealized in Ayn Rand’s
writings as one in which “job creators” (Republican-speak for corporations and
the super-rich) got to amass huge profits and build giant industries while the
workers who actually created their wealth got just barely enough to live on,
and sometimes not even that.
Now the Tea
Party wants to take us back even farther than the 1880’s — to the early years
of the United States, when the country was dominated by owners of huge
plantations whose workforces they either owned outright as slaves or paid such
pittances they might as well have, and in which only a handful of property
owners had political rights at all. At least part of this stems from a
Right-wing understanding that a republic can survive only as long as it does
not allow the dispossessed majority — “the 99 percent,” as the Occupy movement
calls them — to redistribute wealth and income by voting high taxes on the 1
percent. Once again, James Madison’s words in Federalist #10 support the Tea Party’s agenda: “A rage for
paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or
for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole
body of the Union than any particular member of it.” Madison, who on some
issues — notably the freedoms of the Bill of Rights — was among the most
progressive of the Founding Fathers, would, if he were alive today, quite
likely denounce the Occupy movement as an “improper or wicked project.”
The Tea Party’s
drive to return to the Founders’ desire for a limited republic that would
ensure the dominance of propertied interests — the great landowners who were
the 1 percent of their day — is taking many forms on the ground. It includes
not only such unlikely dreams as a call to repeal the 17th Amendment
and return the election of Senators to state legislatures but a series of
restrictions on voting rights Republican governors and state legislators are
rushing through to keep younger, poorer and darker people from being able to
vote at all. Under the guise of preventing “voter fraud,” states governed by
Republicans are cutting back or eliminating same-day voter registration, early
voting and mail ballots — used largely by working-class and student voters —
and in Florida a Republican legislature and governor passed such draconian
restrictions against private organizations’ voter registration drives that the
League of Women Voters announced they would stop doing them because, as the
group’s Florida president Deirdre Macnab said, “We could not put our volunteers
at risk of these fines and penalties.”
When they’re
covered at all — which, aside from an excellent front-page article in the
October 30 Los Angeles Times, they
generally haven’t been by the mainstream media — these restrictions on voting
rights have been portrayed as Republican efforts to defeat President Obama and
the Democrats in 2012 by shrinking the pool of potential Democratic voters.
That’s just a short-term goal; the long-term intent is farther-reaching than
that. It was expressed by Florida State Senator Michael Bennett (R-Bradenton)
when he called voting “a hard-fought privilege” — not a right, but a privilege, which in legal-speak means a gift (like driving or
practicing medicine) the government giveth and the government can taketh away.
“This is something people died for,” Senator Bennett said. “Why should we make
it easier?”
At a time when a lot of the rhetoric on the
Left is openly contemptuous of electoral politics, and many Leftists wrongly
believe that both major political parties are so totally dominated by corporate
lobbyists and the 1 percent’s campaign donations that it doesn’t matter who
wins elections (it doesn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as it should, but it
still matters), the American Right is pursuing a long-term strategy to
re-establish a piece of the Founding Fathers’ “original intent” this country
should have outgrown a long time ago. The idea that under the guise of a
“republic” we should actually be governed by a self-perpetuating elite runs
counter to over two centuries’ worth of struggle to build a truly democratic
America out of the limited republic the original Constitution bequeathed us. We
ignore this struggle at our peril. To paraphrase Senator Bennett, people died
so that wage workers, people of color, and women could vote in this country.
Why should we make it easier for the Tea Partiers and the rich people who fund
them to take our votes away from us?
