"One way to assess the historical significance of the new Tea Party, in comparison to the original, is to look at a wider context. The people in 1773 Boston were doing more than tossing tea into the harbor. They were participating in building new political institutions, foremost of which were the “committees of correspondence” and other manifestations of local government taking on wider responsibilities. By the time the Continental Congress formed in 1774, colonists had a fair degree of experience with self-government. The tossing of tea to avoid payment of a tax was an act of an increasingly self-governed people.

The Bostonians who tried to look like Indians when they boarded the ships to toss tea were doing something more significant than hiding their identities. Their Indian disguises symbolized a source of their new political understanding. Indians symbolized political freedom, because they demonstrated humans could govern themselves in communities. Indians and Indian governments were the antithesis to the monarchical empire governing the colonies.

By contrast, the tea partiers today, though familiar with, and in some cases experienced at political organization, are not developing anything like a new program for self-governance. Their calls for revolution seem geared more toward fielding new candidates for office than toward new structures of office. Their anti-incumbent anger glorifies lack of political experience rather than new political experience. In sharp contrast to the original, today’s tea partiers are as likely to regard Indian self-government as a problem than as a solution.

These points of difference between the old and new tea parties do not indicate that the new tea party cannot have historical significance, but they raise the question whether and how a tea party that reflects the collapse of legitimate government can play a positive role in building legitimate authority."

Get the Story:
Peter d'Errico: A tale of two tea parties (Indian Country Today 6/15)

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