From the Puritans to the Tea Party

[Valin]

Library of Law and Liberty:

Richard Samuelson

1/6/14

 

Where does the Tea Party come from? William Galston recently argued that the Tea Party represents an update of the “Jacksonian tradition.” Drawing upon the work of Walter Russell Mead, Galston says that they “embrace a distinctive code, whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage.” That’s true to a point but it also misses something fundamental. There are also some Puritan elements in the Tea Party.

 

The Puritans have a bad rap in American culture. Puritans, so the story goes, were killjoys who invented the witch hunt, and they were known to punish fornication and other such sins. But trying witches was hardly unique to the Puritans–witch trials were quite common in early modern Europe, and they were hardly unknown in colonial British America outside of Massachusetts. The last witch trial in the colonies was probably the one that took place in Virginia in 1730. And colonial Virginia was known to punish fornication, although probably less regularly than colonial Massachusetts. Because they have such a bad rap, movements are often loathe to be associated with the American Puritans. Yet the Puritans represent some important elements of American culture, many of which are manifest in the modern Tea Party. In particular, the Tea Party echoes the Puritan belief that America is a special nation with a special purpose, they share the middle class character of the Puritan colonies, the hostility to cronyism and special privileges, the worry that welfare breeds dependency, and even, to a degree, support for local government against the forces of centralization.

 

Perhaps the most obvious connection between the American Puritans and the modern Tea Party is the idea of “American Exceptionalism.” The term may be a 20th Century coinage, but the concept is much older. En route to Massachusetts in 1630, John Winthrop spoke of the Puritan colony as “as a city upon a hill.” That phrase was a favorite of Ronald Reagan, himself a favorite of the modern Tea Party. But what does it mean? For Winthrop, it meant that the community was engaged in a holy experiment. The conventional wisdom of the day held that it would be impossible to build any community, much less a well functioning one, on Puritan principles. If the Puritan experiment succeeded, Massachusetts would be a model for future colonies.

 

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