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My friend Ben Carp has an excellent post on the anti-Obama tea parties at the blog Public Occurrences 2.0.  It’s very much worth checking out.  Ben is a history professor at Tufts, and he focuses on the colonial period and has a book coming out soon about the Boston Tea Party.  So there are few people more qualified to talk about the historical analogies that the tea party protesters want to claim.  Ben writes:

One historical analogy that fails, however, is the idea that the
Bostonians aboard the tea ships in 1773 were protesting higher taxes
under the Tea Act.  This is just wrong.

  • First, the British Parliament first passed the tax on tea in 1767,
    and Bostonians had in fact purchased plenty of tea bearing the
    threepenny-per-pound duty during the intervening years.  New Yorkers
    and Philadelphians, who smuggled almost all of their tea from Holland
    and elsewhere, were in fact outraged at how little the New Englanders
    were able to stick to their “anti-tax” principles.  In this respect,
    the Boston Tea Party was almost an apology.
  • Second, the Tea Act would in fact have lowered the price
    of tea for Americans–so the idea of invoking the “Tea Party” every time
    you think your taxes are too high is incorrect.  Instead, the Tea Party
    protesters were energized by a series of principles: the government was
    propping up a monopoly company (the East India Company), the government
    was perpetuating an unjust tax (the 1767 tax on tea which had been
    confirmed in 1770), and the government was using the revenue from that
    tax to pay the salaries of judges and executive officials, thus
    rendering them independent of local legislatures.
  • Third, and most importantly: I’ve been extremely dismayed at how many of the protesters say, “Taxation WITH representation ain’t so hot either.“  (I’m not just cherry-picking a random blog comment here–this phrase is everywhere.)

Well, no, no one LIKES paying taxes, but most people recognize that you
need some form of taxation in order to pay firemen and astronauts,
defend the country’s borders, try to ensure that our food isn’t
poisoned, etc.  The point of protest against the Stamp Act, Townshend
Acts, and Tea Act in 1765-1774 was that “taxation WITHOUT
representation” would lead to slavery–in other words, the colonists
believed that the British ministry was arbitrarily levying taxes on
Americans when those Americans had no say in electing members of
Parliament.  In a democratic republican government, if you don’t like
the level of your taxes or you don’t like how your tax money is spent,
you have the power to peaceably “throw the bums out.”  And you
certainly have the First Amendment right to protest and rail against
the stimulus and bailout.  But the point is, the people of the
Revolutionary Era had to fight for those rights to get rid of a
constitutional monarchy–it’s hardly the case that paying taxes from a
colony to a (partially hereditary) government that you don’t elect is
the same as paying taxes to a government consisting of representatives
and an executive that you DO have the power to elect.

Ben goes on to say that maybe the protesters feel like they don’t have a representative government anymore, and maybe that’s why they are protesting.  I think that’s being too nice to the people protesting.  It seems clear to me that a lot of these protesters simply oppose the President.  It’s a partisan thing all the way down, as Fox News’ promotion of this event makes clear.  Based on the anger I’ve seen on the right and the crazed level of vitriol (exhibit A: Glenn Beck) I would hazard a guess that we will see the Crazy Scale reach a 7 or 8 out of 10 (10 being Beck Crazy).  Andrew Sullivan summed it up nicely today:

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It’s a function of a movement’s intellectual collapse and a party’s fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

I hope responsible Republicans start to realize how fringe their party is  starting to become and begin speaking out against all this ridiculous talk of “revolution”.  We do need a serious party of opposition to provide alternative ideas and engage in a rational debate with the Democrats.  But, hey, if a tea party protest allows people who are still unhappy with the election results in November to release some of their anger, more power to them.  But somehow I doubt that this one protest is going to stop the nonsense.