Maddow set up the discussion by talking about the left-wing People's Bicentennial Commission:
MADDOW: In 1974, two years before America turned 200, lefties started a Tea Party movement. A lefty group called the people's bicentennial commission published what they called a planning and activity guide for citizens' participation during the bicentennial years. And in that guide, in 1974, they suggested that people form Tea Parties because they said the country needed, quote, "A new party, a movement that will treat tax reform as one aspect of a fight for genuine equality of property and power." Equality of property? Hmm. Yes, the lefty Tea Party idea from the '70s, was that the T, the T in Tea Party should stand for tax equity for Americans. Equity as in equality.They made some suggestions for lefty Tea Partiers including, quote, "How about a King George exhibit of tax avoiders in some public park with pictures and charts of the loopholes they used?" Why not use the example of the Boston Tea Party to highlight all the loopholes and tricks that rich people and corporations use to avoid paying their fair share of taxes! Why not? The people's bicentennial commission again, this is 1974 also suggested that left wing Tea Partiers of the 1970s use the slogan, "Don't Tread on Me." Doesn't that just burn you up, conservative Tea Partiers that just one generation ago a bunch of dirty hippies looked at the same Gadsden flag, the same chapter in the history of book about throwing the tea in the Boston harbor and they took exactly the opposite political message from it for today? Doesn't that burn you up?
And then she segued gently into her discussion with Lepore, and how she came to write the book, which flowed out of her own encounter with Tea Partiers, as a result of teaching about the Revolution:
I thought it would. Which is why if you guys really want to get your blood pressure going, you should read the book I got that out of. It's called "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History," it's written by Harvard American History professor Jill Lepore who joins us now for the interview.Professor Lepore, thank you very much for being here. Congratulations on this book.
JILL LEPORE, "THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES" AUTHOR: Thanks a lot.
MADDOW: I enjoyed it very much. And I think that, it is a book about American history and the Tea Party both for critics of the Tea Party and for Tea Partiers. It seems like you actually really enjoyed your interactions with the movement.
LEPORE: Yes, I thought, I did. So, you know, I teach a research seminar at Harvard on the revolution every spring and the Tea Party was forming. We would do field trips in Boston. We would bump into people from the Tea Party and, you know, here we are doing a field trip trying to go down to the ship or go down to the harbor and study the events of the 18th century. And there were also deeply interested in the 18th century. And I think the interest in most ordinary people involved in Tea Party movement in the revolution is quite passionate and deeply felt.
MADDOW: Yes.
LEPORE: So, I thought, you know, I got to go hang out with these people and see why, you know, why-it's really actually kind of a hard sell in class trying to get people to come take a class. Everyone takes like 1968 to the present. It's the most popular American history.
MADDOW: I want to know why my dad is so weird.
It's only here that Lepore starts to talk about how the Tea Partiers' views diverge so sharply from historians' understanding, and it's clear, but careful explanation of this that made me want to share this with folks. She starts off by identifying two different things that Tea Partiers do, one is political appropriation, which she notes has been going on since two years after the Revolution, and the second is what she calls "folklore". I found it particularly interesting how she could combine a very clear critical perspective with a non-judgmental view, of, 'Well, this is just what people do with history, they always have':
LEPORE: Yes, you know, and you just, come on, the revolution is so interesting. And then, finally all of a sudden all of these people are so interested in the revolution. It was really fun to go and hear what fascinated them about the revolution. I mean, it was discordant because it's completely different from what I think about the revolution and how I teach it but really interesting to hear those views.MADDOW: When you say it's discordant and it's different from what you know about history as an American history professor, is it that people are telling stories that aren't true or that people are being so invested in coming up with lessons for today's politics from American history they have skewed stuff?
LEPORE: Well, I think there's a variety of different ways that people... I mean, there's obviously a quite cynical kind of poaching of the past like, let's just hunt through history to find something that buttresses our own political argument.
MADDOW: Yes.
LEPORE: And people do as a long standing political tradition. People did that, you know, two years after the revolution was over, right? That's kind of how politics works. And that sometimes that's cynical and sometimes that's not. But I think that for most of the people I used to hang out within the Tea Party, what the revolution meant to them was something that I might think more of as kind of folklore. Like, you know, they have the kind of--I don't know here in New York but in Massachusetts, kids learn about the American Revolution in elementary school and then they actually don't learn about it again. So, most people when they think about the revolution--you know, before I went to graduate school, I thought about, I think, Johnny Tremain or now just like the American girl doll.
MADDOW: Great.
LEPORE: Like a revolution. Like, if you have a kind of something juvenilia, it's almost like a kind of, almost child-like nostalgia for how heroic those tales are and this larger than life figures. And I think that's, you know, that's actually part of our civic heritage. It's not how historians think about the past. So what's kind of odd about the Tea Party is this, you know, civic-minded folklore that we cherish that are sort of kind of stories we tell about the past being deployed to make political arguments that are completely inflexible.
That's what's so crucial--the so-innocent roots of such harsh inflexibility, even, in the end, intolerance. It's this paradoxical nature of the phenomena that a really grounded historian like Lepore incorporates in her understanding, and that understanding is a real gift for us, if we can figure out how to really use it.
On the one hand, Maddow is quite right to lay down what it means in terms of consequences:
MADDOW: Yes. Well, you describe it as a form of historical fundamentalism, this sort of, you know, this thing that a lot of different people have done from a lot of different perspectives, commodification and almost like merchandising of the revolution and the founding fathers. You describe the way it's being used now as a fundamentalism. And what do you mean by that?
Yes, at the same time, Lepore back-tracks a bit before she gets to the point of basically agreeing with Maddow, although with greater specificity:
LEPORE: Well, I think that what's kind of, a bunch of different things come together. And you know, as the Tea Party is vast and diffuse and some are confused in a lot of ways. All sorts of elements planned. But one of the things that I think that's really happened is that originalism as a mode of jurisprudence, as an argument of how to interpret the constitution and the courts contributes to how we think about the 18th century especially people on the far right as does fundamentalism. Since the Reagan revolution you think about the roles of evangelicals and their influence in American political culture. And originalism and fundamentalism, Religious fundamentalism share a set of ideas about the past that are completely opposed to how historians think about the past. We want to investigate it and question it and uncover it and explore and interrogate the past. They actually want us to reveal the past and we want to understand the past as having a finality to it.MADDOW: Yes. So questioning is a form of blasphemy then?
LEPORE: Questioning, right, right. So, if you make a political argument, let's say, I disagree with the bailout and I say to you, OK, here's my disagreement with the bailout. I don't think the tax structure is effective, looking forward, I don't think it's sustainable. I'm worried about the debt, et cetera. If I say to you, the founding fathers would have been opposed to the bailout and I've also said to you, the founding fathers are divinely inspired and the constitution is a sacred document and speaks to us the way the gospel speaks to us, the way Jesus is alive today, if he was alive as he was the day he died. That's an important truth for many people. And to think about the people who drafted the constitution in that same way, that's what I mean by historical fundamentalism, because then how can we actually debate the bailout. Because if I say to you, no, I actually don't think, I actually support the bailout.
And the consequences, of course:
MADDOW: Then, I'm going to burn you at the stake.LEPORE: .then I'm a heretic.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Yes.
LEPORE: You know, this is obviously, this is not where we're at but this is what's worrisome to me because that's actually not a political conversation. That's where civility ends.
MADDOW: Yes.
LEPORE: That's actually where a part of conversations breaks down.
MADDOW: And that's why you have to be invested in evidence having no meaning in order to always be sure that your interpretation of history will win the day.
LEPORE: Right.
MADDOW: Yes. Jill Lepore, author of "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History," American History professor at Harvard. This is a great read and I really enjoyed it. And it's nice of you to come in. Thanks a lot.
LEPORE: All right. Thanks a lot.
What Lepore was saying there towards the end is extremely important. The right--and Versailles, under rightwing influence, has a totally bogus discourse around civility. Newt Gingrich, when he came in as Speaker, was all bomb-throwing and talking about liberals as being the "enemies of normal Americans" at the same time that he was also talking about the importance of civility. And that comes out of simply assuming that he had a monopoly on truth and righteousness. But as Lepore lays out, it's precisely the inflexibility of unshakable belief that's the real root of inflexibility and incivility that makes a democratic republican form of government an impossibility.
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