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Tax History: Tea Parties, Taxes, and the Search for a (Mis)Usable Past

Posted on June 21, 2021

What ever happened to the Tea Party?

If you’re over the age of 25, you have a shot at remembering the movement’s creation moment: the 2009 rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. You might also recall that for a few years at least, the Tea Party dominated American politics, calling the tune for both parties.

But then the Tea Party disappeared. Or more precisely, it was subsumed. The Tea Party was always a hybrid organization, part grassroots, part AstroTurf. Over time, however, both elements were absorbed by other movements and organizations, including (most notably) the House Freedom Caucus and Donald Trump’s electoral machine. This process changed the substance of Tea Party conservatism — and modern conservatism itself.

What didn’t change, however, was the fixation on history that animated the early Tea Party; even today, conservatives venerate the founding era that gave the Tea Party its name. That’s probably because the Tea Party’s historical trappings were more than just, well, trappings. They were more than a convenient rhetorical trope. All the talk about Founding Fathers and liberty and revolutionary ideals — it was more than just talk. For the Tea Party, history was ideology, and sometimes even a guide to policy formulation (although this function was more tenuous).

The Tea Party of 2009 was confused about the history it claimed to embrace — and especially about its namesake Tea Party of 1773. I’ve made this point before, and I will do it again (because misconceptions matter, especially when they linger). (Prior analysis: Tax Notes Federal, May 11, 2020, p. 927; Tax Notes Federal, Mar. 16, 2020, p. 1716.)

But the modern Tea Party’s misunderstanding of the original Tea Party underscored a more serious problem: a misunderstanding of history itself. The Tea Party routinely conflated past with present, blithely transposing ideas (and sometimes individuals) across the centuries with no regard for changing conditions and circumstances.

This ahistorical version of history was especially evident around the subject of taxation, where Tea Partiers embraced founding-era tax mythologies (like the original Tea Party) to justify an implacable hostility to contemporary federal taxation.

Tea Party Rant

Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on the instrumental use of history; liberals and progressives also reach for the mantle of historical legitimacy from time to time. But conservatives seem especially quick to invoke the Founders in the middle of contemporary policy debates.

One such moment came in February 2009, not quite a month into Barack Obama’s new presidency, when Santelli unleashed his tirade against the new administration’s economic program. Santelli suggested that people join him for a “Chicago Tea Party” to dump “derivative securities” into Lake Michigan. The Tea Party phrasing would immediately catch fire, but Santelli’s broader historical claim also proved durable. “This is America,” he shouted at the camera. “If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.”

For Santelli, the Tea Party framing may have been more rhetorical than substantive; he was and is quite the performer, with a flair for televised outrage. But for many rank-and-file Tea Partiers — the activists who joined local groups, voted in local elections, and helped transform the Republican Party — these historical claims were both powerful and important. Powerful because they elicited an emotional reaction that moved individuals to collective action; important because they implied certain policy positions, including a hostility to some kinds of federal spending and the taxes required to pay for them.

Tea Party Politics

The Tea Party was always diffuse and disorganized — as befits a grassroots political phenomenon. But there was also an element of AstroTurf surrounding the movement, as deep-pocketed political groups tried to harness its disruptive energy for traditional, institutional ends. Other scholars have argued that the AstroTurf actually came first and the grassroots only later; in this telling, groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity helped facilitate the movement’s organization, which only later took on a life of its own.

I suspect the chicken and the egg appeared simultaneously. Clearly, Tea Party groups enjoyed early support from well-funded conservative donors, but the grassroots energy was also real, even at the very beginning (or perhaps especially at the very beginning).

Either way, the modern Tea Party movement proved itself a potent political phenomenon. The movement revitalized a dispirited Republican Party during a moment of deep despair. The GOP emerged from the smoking wreckage of the 2008 presidential election to win a smashing victory in the 2010 midterms. In a moment of remarkable candor, Obama acknowledged that Democrats had suffered a “shellacking,” losing their majority in the House and shrinking their Senate majority by six seats (seven if you include a special election held earlier in the year).

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, offered a memorable summary of Obama’s predicament: “He couldn’t get a Mother’s Day resolution passed in the House at this point.”

Tea Party Beliefs

But if the Tea Party wouldn’t support anything proposed by Obama, what policies would it embrace? Did the revitalized GOP — and the new House majority, in particular — have a governing agenda?

The Tea Party was never anything close to a cohesive political party, but those inclined to identify with the movement shared some beliefs and inclinations. One of the best surveys of these beliefs can be found in a 2011 book by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

Chief among the Tea Party commitments was a “reverence for the Constitution,” as well as the men who drafted it, according to Skocpol and Williamson. “The U.S. founding documents are woven into the warp and woof of Tea Party routines,” they wrote. Images of these documents adorned Tea Party trinkets — pins, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and the like. But the reverence was real: It wasn’t all about the merch. Tea Partiers were also attending seminars, workshops, and lectures on constitutional principles. The Tea Party, in other words, was taking the Constitution both seriously and literally.

The literal part was especially important. “Tea Partiers do not see their use of history as interpretive, and they are resistant to notions that historians or lawyers might be needed to make sense of the Constitution and apply it to ongoing disputes. For regular Tea Party participants, the Constitution is a clear-cut document readily applicable to modern political issues,” Skocpol and Williamson wrote.

Tea Party Taxes

Chief among those modern political issues was tax policy. Skocpol and Williamson found the Tea Partiers to be generally inconsistent in their views about government, including the utility of both taxes and spending. “At the abstract level,” the scholars reported, Tea Party members tended to “decry big government, out-of-control public spending, and ballooning deficits.”

When confronted with specific programs, however, Tea Partiers were more heterodox in their attitudes toward fiscal policy. Like most people, they were inclined to endorse spending for programs they liked (such as Social Security and Medicare) and were willing to pay the taxes necessary to fund them.

“When it comes to sustaining existing, well-loved social programs like Social Security and Medicare — programs that go to Americans like themselves who are perceived to have ‘earned’ the benefits — Tea Party people put their money where their affection is,” Skocpol and Williamson wrote.

This willingness to tolerate some taxes for specific kinds of spending was striking for its inconsistency — especially since Tea Partiers remained deeply and publicly hostile to the general notion of an expansive fiscal state. Antitax agitation remained a cornerstone of Tea Party political activity, especially evident during tax day protests where people were known to arrive wearing T-shirts that claimed TEA as an acronym: Taxed Enough Already.

And of course, there was the movement’s name itself: Tea Partiers had branded their movement with reference to the nation’s most iconic tax protest.

Original Tea Party

The Tea Partiers of 2009 got the history mostly wrong when they invoked the original Tea Party of 1773. To the extent that the 21st-century Tea Party was a protest against taxes, it was a protest about the level of taxation. By contrast, the 18th-century Boston Tea Party was a protest about the power to tax, and specifically the relationship between political representation and taxation.

In 2010 Harvard University historian Jill Lepore published The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History. As the title suggests, the book explored the uses of history, and especially how the modern Tea Party movement embraced and appropriated the U.S. founding era. The original Tea Party featured prominently in her story.

A quick refresher on the outlines of the original Tea Party:

In May 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, levying a tax of threepence per pound on tea imported to the American colonies. The act represented a retreat from the broader array of import taxes known as the Townshend duties imposed in 1767; the colonists had reviled and resisted these earlier levies from the moment of their passage. After six years of conflict with the colonists, Parliament conceded the game but not the point: The American colonies would be spared most of the previous import duties, and even the tax on tea would be reduced. But Parliament chose to retain the tea tax for both symbolic and substantive reasons. First, keeping the tax would underscore Parliament’s right to tax the colonies directly (repealed levies notwithstanding). Second, the tax would make possible an important corporate bailout.

The East India Company was a well-connected, enormously powerful joint stock company, originally chartered in 1600 to facilitate British trade in Asia. Despite its many legal privileges, the company had faced recurring financial problems, and in the early 1770s, it faced an existential crisis. Parliament planned to use the Tea Act to shore up its balance sheet. The act eliminated taxes on tea already stored in London warehouses and awaiting transshipment to the American colonies. As noted earlier, it also reduced the existing Townshend duty on tea to just threepence per pound. Together, these measures made Company tea cheaper than most alternatives available to colonial consumers, undercutting even the smuggled Dutch tea that was then dominating the market.

The colonists, however, were unimpressed by the new availability of cheap Company tea. As Lepore explains, the Tea Act “offended the colonists, gravely, by its forceful assertion of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies.” The colonists believed that the power to tax lay with colonial assemblies, not with a distant Parliament that included no colonial representatives.

Many colonial leaders also worried that a successful effort to tax tea would establish precedent for more taxes. This was the flip side of the British argument for the levy. Parliament believed that retaining the tax on tea would underscore Britain’s authority to levy taxes directly on its American colonies; the colonists agreed, which is why they were determined to resist it.

Finally, the colonists objected to the 18th-century version of crony capitalism: Parliament’s insistence on bailing out a well-connected corporation, granting it a monopoly, and expecting other people to foot the bill. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to dominate the market for tea, cutting many colonial merchants out of the business entirely. This was galling, not to mention expensive for many leading colonists of the merchant class.

Ultimately, then, the low price of tea engineered by the Tea Act was immaterial, at least for many colonial leaders. Bigger issues were at stake. “It wasn’t the price,” Lepore wrote in explaining the original Tea Party. “It was the principle.”

This principle drove Bostonians to an act of civil disobedience. Determined to prevent the East India Company from unloading its cheap tea in the city (let alone selling it), a mob met the company’s ships at the city’s waterfront when they arrived in mid-December 1773. On the night of December 16, members of that mob boarded the tea ships, broke open their holds, and tossed their cargo into the harbor.

A Different Story

The story of the original Tea Party is a good one, replete with high drama and threatened violence. But nothing about this story makes it especially relevant to the Tea Party movement of 2009. For the colonists, the central issue was Parliament’s assertion that it could levy taxes directly on the colonies, without the involvement of colonial legislatures and despite the lack of colonial representation in London.

But in 2009 complaints about taxation without representation were nonsensical. As Lepore noted, they came just months after “the inauguration of a president who won the electoral vote 365 to 173 and earned 53 percent of the popular vote.” In an era of universal suffrage, representation isn’t the problem it was two centuries ago, Lepore contended. That didn’t stop modern Tea Partiers from echoing ancient complaints about “no taxation without representation.” It just made those complaints puzzling.

They become less puzzling, however, when set in a broader context. The Tea Party’s contemporary rhetoric can be confusing because it drew so deeply and directly on historical precedent. But the party’s view of history itself was confused. History, as understood by the Tea Party, wasn’t really historical at all. For Tea Partiers, past and present were joined in a timeless continuum. Lepore calls this anti-history.

“In antihistory, time is an illusion. Either we’re there, two hundred years ago, or they’re here, among us,” Lepore wrote of the Founders and how the Tea Party approached them. She described a Tea Party rally featuring an appearance by Fox News host Sean Hannity. The rally began with a special appearance by an actor dressed as one of the Founders, who established the seamless, timeless linkage between past and present.

“The United States of America was formed by common people, risking all they had to defy an arrogant regime, taxing them into submission. And now that arrogance has returned, threatening the very foundation of our republic. My name is Thomas Paine,” intoned a solemn figure in 18th-century garb.

Invoking Paine in the service of a contemporary political agenda is one thing. But blithely eliding the myriad differences distinguishing colonial tax complaints from GOP objections to the Obama fiscal agenda? That’s something else. It’s more than rhetorical sleight of hand. It’s a misuse of history.

Bad History

It’s not, however, unusual. As Skocpol and Williamson pointed out in their own study of the modern Tea Party, political actors of every stripe engage in such shenanigans. “For Tea Partiers, as for most people engaged in politics, history is a tool for battle, not a subject for university seminar musings,” they wrote. “Political actors regularly invoke the past for reasons other than intellectual debate or verisimilitude. Invocations of the past are didactic and metaphorical.”

For the modern Tea Party and taxation, invocations of the past have been instrumentally useful in defending a low-tax agenda. It’s worth noting, however, that the Tea Party itself has struggled with the problems inherent to anti-history. By transposing antitax ideas from the 18th century to the 21st century (or at least what it believed to be antitax ideas), the Tea Party was forced to ignore the actual history that intervened. This actual history included the history of Social Security, Medicare, and other modern fiscal innovations that Tea Partiers actually liked. If the Tea Partiers were ideologically inconsistent, as Skocpol and Williamson pointed out, part of the explanation lies in the tension between their actual lived experience and their odd, ahistorical view of the past.

The misreading and misappropriation of history needs to be called out whenever it happens — and especially when events and individuals are yanked from their historical context and transposed onto current events. Failing to do so cheapens the history and impoverishes contemporary political debate.

It makes no sense to treat the Founders — or any other historical actors — as players on the contemporary scene. “‘What would the founders do?’ is, from the point of view of historical analysis, an ill-considered and unanswerable question, and pointless, too,” Lepore concluded in her study of the Tea Party. Judges and even some legislators might need to ponder this question from time to time. But most of us should be making up our own minds.

“Citizens and their elected officials have all sorts of reasons to support or oppose all sorts of legislation and government action, including constitutionality, precedence, and the weight of history,” Lepore wrote. “But it’s possible to cherish the stability of the law and the durability of the Constitution, as amended over two and a half centuries of change and one civil war, and tested in the courts, without dragging the Founding Fathers from their graves.”

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