The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation,
and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party
faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay
in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s
why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers.
These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders
because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute.
The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate battle flag. Let a group of right-wingers
ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew
Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification
and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology