The Tea Party
When I watch John Meacham on MSNBC at any time of day (he is a popular and regular guest on all their shows ranging from Morning Joe to The 11th Hour), he always strikes me as very calm and poised despite the serious and concerning issues he is addressing about the deficiencies of our current President and the state of political affairs in this country. I just assumed it was because he is a poised and soft-spoken man, the sort of man who might become a presidential historian after a short stretch as a journalist. But I’ve now concluded that he is that way for other reasons, ones that have more to do with the nature of being a student of history.
I am currently reading (just begun) The British Are Coming, by Rick Atkinson. Atkinson is the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author/historian who, like Meacham, spent decades as a journalist (in his case at the Washington Post) and has turned his lifelong interest in military history into a prolific career documenting first, the battles of WWII (The Liberation Trilogy) and now the American Revolution. The British Are Coming is the first of his trilogy on this great war. He is the new Stephen Ambrose or Cornelius Ryan, a fine path to tread for anyone.
What I have just learned about the Boston Tea Party and the basis for the British actions that led up to that act of sedition by American colonists is most enlightening in the broader context of things that are going around us today. I must admit, I used the title of this piece with great trepidation given the most recent political connotations it holds in the United States political sphere. But, learning (or for some more well-read than me, relearning) about the causes of the British focus on tea and the importance of the British East India Company to British commerce and global mercantilism was interesting. Yes, history is interesting in and of itself. Knowledge for knowledges’ sake and all of that. But I am talking about the precipitous and “unprecedented” position the American “empire” finds itself in relative to the place where other great empires all eventually find themselves in. We like to use the Roman Empire when we talk about the American situation, but I suggest that the British Empire, with its basis almost totally in economic power (especially and more of the sort we can relate with) and the military might (Britannia rules the waves and all of that) that supported that, seems a far closer and better analogy.
Learning about the problems England was having with the aging of its empire by 1770 was very revealing because it showed that the natural lifecycle of some of the trading powerhouses that built the British Empire were making them show their age. There were many such maturing markets, but none more significant than tea. The warehouses in London were crammed with years’ worth of supply just as cheap European imports (sourced in the less dominant regions of southeast Asia) were overwhelming the markets and British demand for tea had peaked. The British East India Company was powerfully connected with the crown (that would be King George III) and they devised all sorts of plans to solve their problems at the expense of the colonials. That might seem harsh from the colonial perspective, but not so to the power elite in London who had spent a fortune defending the frontier against the French not so long ago and who were taxing the colonials at a rate one fifth as great as English citizens were being taxed. You see, empires cost a lot to maintain and England already had one of the highest tax rates in the world.
If this strikes you as very familiar sounding to our current state of affairs here in America today, that’s what I thought. Power wants to retain power. Commercial organizations are like any organisms, they have lifecycles and they mature and get too hard to carry with the old business models. Power tends to want to milk the cows for as long as possible and hence they milk them dry and raise the price of milk while they are doing it. It all seems sensible from their mountaintop perspective. And of course, the people in the valleys don’t see things the same way and you get cries of “no taxation without representation”, which is just another way of saying that old power can only push around new power (the power of the masses, the power of ideology, the power of the “frontier”) for so long before it revolts.
The strange thing in the here and now is that I’m sure the MAGA folks (most recently calling themselves Keep America Great or KAG crowd) think they are the new power in this picture, but they are not. They are the coal miners that are being taken for a Juan Peron ride of populism to the advantage of the existing power elite. The real new power is the power best represented by AOC (Alexandra Ocasio Cortez) or Mayor Pete Buttigieg and the new progressive left and more clearly voiced in the thoughtful and studied policies of Elizabeth Warren. These are the new colonialists of the twenty-first century except they are without the radical and violent elements that were needed in colonial America to force the British to yield.
I enjoy watching the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot because it shows the Revolutionary War to be a bare-knuckled brawl by men hardened during the French and Indian Wars against the Hussars and Light Horse Cavalry of Britain, who treated the colonials less like the wayward countrymen the British General Staff imagined and more like the savages of Africa and the sub-continent that they had to battle with sheer strength and tenacity. I sometimes wonder if the forces of progressive thought lack the equivalent of Washington’s Dragoons to their detriment.
The message I take from all of this is that John Meacham is calm because as a historian he realizes that our current situation and struggles are not so very different than those past. They may seem unprecedented but that adage that there is nothing new under the sun probably holds truer than not. The American Empire is aged and showing its toppishness. Old business models need to be replaced and none more than energy and those things that debilitate our climate. That is where the old elite guard lives and hence we do battle. Everyone is incensed for their own seemingly good reasons. Now we need people who know history to explain that holding back progress is a mugs game that hurts rather then helps the very people wearing their new KAG hats.