Delete comment from: Boston 1775
Thanks for the link, AD. I believe that article might be adapted from Lepore’s book. The New Yorker contacted me while fact-checking it, though the details involved things like paint on the carved soldier outside the modern Green Dragon Tavern.
I think you’re right that it’s easier to be a revolutionary firebrand when your party is out of power. But right-wing Republicans have been out of power for only two to four years, and may regain some Congressional control. Surveys find Tea Party adherents to be richer and more educated than the average American citizen, and of course less likely to come from groups that suffered racial and ethnic discrimination. They’re an unoppressed minority that has adopted the rhetoric of the oppressed, people who have benefited from this society who talk about revolting against it. A curious and perhaps unreconcilable mix.
As Anthony Vaver notes, in our lifetimes American conservative dogma has shifted from treating criticism of the U.S. government per se as unpatriotic and dangerous to treating that as a standard baseline belief. Conservatives always felt justified in criticizing some government initiatives or personnel, of course. But in my youth they also lived by mottos like “law and order” and “my country right or wrong.” That change is, I suspect, the influence of Goldwater-Reagan Republicanism.
Oct 9, 2010, 9:44:44 PM
Posted to Invocations Right and Left