The Exchange: Jill Lepore on the Tea Party’s “Dangerous Anti-Pluralism”

This post is part of The New Yorker’s ongoing coverage of the midterm elections.

It’s been around eighteen months since the Tea Party movement began. On Tuesday, it’s likely that a number of Tea Party-approved candidates will be voted into office, but will this diffuse and decentralized movement have a lasting impact on American politics? In her new book, “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History,” the New Yorker staff writer and Harvard professor Jill Lepore argues that the Tea Party is simply the latest frontline in a centuries-long battle over the legacy of the American Revolution. The book is both a critique of the Tea Party’s “anti-pluralist” version of American history, and a historiography of the Revolution itself. I spoke with Lepore earlier this week, and an edited version of our conversation appears below.

You argue that, for all their invocation of history, the twenty-first-century Tea Party actually has an anti-historical perspective, one in which “time is an illusion.” Can you explain this idea, and why it’s so dangerous? Calvin Trillin wrote a New Yorker essay during the Bicentennial, about what he called “parallelism,” the use of the Revolution, then most commonly by the left, to make a political argument: Richard Nixon was just like King George; Exxon Oil was just like the East India Company; the shootings at Kent State were just like the Boston Massacre. Nothing provides better political cover than the Revolution, which is why the Tea Party’s name—it, brilliantly, contains that parallel—was a stroke of genius. But what’s changed, since 1974, is the growing role of evangelicals in American political life, which has introduced an exegetical reading of the past, in which parallelism has shaded into fundamentalism. A fundamentalist approach to history, which you see in and around the Tea Party, insists that the Constitution was divinely inspired and speaks to us, across the ages, and is therefore incontrovertible, and outside the sphere of political debate, or even of interrogation. Historical scholarship, of course, works otherwise: its methods rely on skepticism and inquiry, and, necessarily, on an appreciation of the distance, and the difference, between past and present.

You write that even before the Revolution was over, opposing factions had begun to claim its legacy. This seems natural, to an extent. Is the problem that we fixate too much on this era in our political conversation?

Every generation has got to figure out what the Revolution meant, and whether its promise has been realized. Isn’t that our obligation, as citizens? Sure, there’s a shabby, grubby tit-for-tat way of going about this: the left claims the Revolution; the right claims the Revolution. And so it goes. Maybe that’s how it has got to go, I don’t know. But think of, say, Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech: the truly transcendent moments in American politics have come when people rise to the challenge of history, instead of beating one another over the head with it.

Do you worry that the Tea Party’s appropriation of the Revolution, and in particular of the Boston Tea Party, is at this point irrevocable—that they’ve got the last word on that historical era, so to speak?

Not to worry: no one ever gets the last word. Not even Lincoln.

One of the things I find fascinating is that certain orthodoxies about the Revolution were formed years, and even centuries, after the fact. In particular, you write that the term “Founding Fathers” wasn’t coined until 1916, in a speech by Warren G. Harding. Nowadays, people on the left and the right think of the Founding Fathers as these deified figures. How/when did this come to be?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com