"...[A]n entering wedge, a 'Trojan Horse' ... big with exorbitant Mischiefs.'"
" ... [U]ncontrollable confiscation of ... property...."
"...could 'deprive us of all our invaluable charter rights and privileges, drain us suddenly of our cash, occasion an entire stagnation of trade, discourage every kind of industry'...."
Heath Care reform? Cap and Trade legislation? No, it's the Stamp Act of 1765. The above are what was being written about that infamous Act* by colonial newspapers of the time. And yet much of it we are hearing again, 245 years later, in reference to the acts of our own government! Alas, how easy it is to imagine our would-be patrician political class as Parliament; our imperious President as King George.
The past year has been an education, or rather the events thereof have been the impetus for much self re-education about the specifics and meaning of our founding history. Prior to the January 19th Special Election in Massachusetts, that State was much on my mind from reading, among others, Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution and watching yet again the HBO series on John Adams. Through it all I was trying to get a feel for the passions against the Crown that animated the Massachusetts of 1765 (and the rest of the colonies as well).
My last American History class was oh so long ago in my high school senior year. Unless you pursued an academic career or something analogous, or you are an author or journalist of a certain type, or even a history "buff" or enthusiast, high school probably marked your last formal study of American History, too. Did you not always wonder why the heck the colonists were so fired up about some lousy taxes, exercised to the point of taking on the greatest military power of the world? Did you not think the equivalence between taxes imposed by a distant and aloof monarchy as dire and mortal threats to basic liberties a touch hyperbolic?
For the last ten years I would say that Americans have been on the path of a slowly building and increasingly incredulous realization that their government and its functionaries are almost completely out of touch, insulated, protected and self-perpetuating without much of a glance toward the electorate save for election time. And even at election time, thanks to morally bankrupt redistricting, the drill is not so much people selecting representatives as it is politicians picking voters. The 2000 election marked the first time that I remember feeling that both parties had become so alienated from the public that they nominated two unattractive candidates. President Bush didn't waste much time straying from any semblance of a conservative agenda, beginning with that atrocious Farm Aid bill a few months into his first year, and continuing with the Medicare Drug act, and then of course the late 2008 bailouts. There is a straight line from there to the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback, and Gitmo-in-Illinois.
Along the way voters had an opportunity to weigh in, if only indirectly, in special elections and gubernatorial elections - NY23, Virginia and New Jersey. Finally, we got to the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat. The results of these elections were surprising, sometimes shocking, and no matter who won, should be unsettling to any incumbent. As Scott Brown said shortly after his come-from-behind upset, voters weren't just angry, they were irate.
In the John Adams HBO series there is a scene where Adams is dispatching his 14 year old son, John Quincy, off to St. Petersburg, Russia. Is it cold there? asked his son. Yes, said Adams, but nothing that a "Massachusetts man" cannot handle. Watching this before January 19, I asked myself, just what is a "Massachusetts man" today? What had become of the heirs of John and Samuel Adams, their passion for liberty and distrust of the State? Gone, I thought - the election of 2008 was a repudiation of our founding principles and the fulfillment of Tocqueville's admonition that as soon as the people figured out they could legislate favors for themselves out of the public treasury, democracy would die. It was the culmination of 100 years of stealthy subversion by the American Progressive movement.
One of the more sober (and optimistic) voices this past year has been Bill Bennett. On his morning talk show he has repeatedly said that eventually Americans would start acting like Americans again, and the accumulating petty tyrannies of our current government would be resisted, and hopefully rolled back before they became entrenched tyrannies. And that was pretty much his take after the Scott Brown victory: American politics is still played pretty much between the 40 yard lines, and eventually Americans reassert themselves and their freedom-loving principles.
Is that what happened on January 19th? Is this the end point of rising antipathy to Imperial Washinton? We will see. The Brown victory is not an ending. It is at best (if not a flash in the pan) only a beginning, and judging from the response from Democrats (the real "doubling-down" response, not the faux-chastened public face they are putting on) the struggle for freedom is only going to get sharper. Just this morning Fox news reports that Democrats have been meeting behind closed doors (where else?) to fashion an implementation of the "reconciliation" tactic to pass Obamacare.
"The Struggle for freedom." How odd to be thinking about that subject in the United States of America in 2010. Yet if you read our history you know that our founders knew something that we have forgotten until recently: Freedom is always under assault, from without and within. Powerful, autocratic government is the antithesis of freedom. So, know our history! Know that we have been through this before, and much of what we need to know to prevail, much of what we need to re-learn, has been done, here, before - by"Massachusetts men" no less. We have a 245+ year history of living in freedom and protecting our freedom. Freedom has the advantage in this country still, but no advantage however great, can prevail over inaction.
The question on our minds should be, What comes after Irate?
*as quoted in Maier, p 51.
