July 13, 2010
With Michelle Obama's comments yesterday and the NAACP's resolution condemning "racist elements of the Tea Party" likely to be passed today, it seems clear that branding the Tea Partiers as racist or at least intolerant is a strategy that the left intends to pursue to mitigate electoral damage this November.
The touchstone of this allegation has been, of course, the symbolic march of the majority party through the Tea Party protest on the afternoon of the House Health Care vote. The procession of government officials through private citizens was supposed to, I guess, represent the victory of freedom and equality over tyranny and racism. The irony here is that government power has been the greatest institutional facilitator of racism in our nation's history.
Many remember, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for America in his majestic “I Have a Dream” speech. Fewer, however, quote the factor which drove him and hundreds of thousands of others on that sultry August afternoon.
“So we’ve come here today…to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
The great question facing the Republic today is just how big is that check and can we or any state possibly carry enough in its account to cover it? Is the check for liberty, freedom, and equality under the law? Or does it also cover the government guaranteed right to a fair wage, home ownership, protection from economic fear and unemployment, health insurance, carbon neutrality, a religion free public square, a college football playoff, and whatever else those with 50% plus one of the vote believe to be good for us?
It is clear that our founders and the giants whose shoulders they and King stood on believed only in drafting checks you can cash.
In writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson borrowed heavily from John Locke, a Christian political philosopher who suggested that God rather than man or government was the source of our rights to life, liberty and property.
Alexander Hamilton explained, “the sacred rights of mankind…are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power”. Our government was put in place by a social contract of the people, who consented to cede a limited amount of their sovereignty to that government so as to have those God-given rights protected.
In his first inaugural address, President George Washington stated that “the foundations of our national policy would be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private (i.e. not government) morality”.
The unifying thread for The Tea Party movement is a modest expectation for what government can guarantee and immodesty in their expectation for what free people of good will can achieve.
Perhaps because this thread runs to the core of who America has always believed herself to be, The Tea Party movement now is being embraced by long time Democrats and long time Republicans, those with high levels of education and those with little education, those who have never before participated in political events, and political veterans. Although there are obviously some leaders who are trying to bring organization to the movement, by and large, events and protests are driven by those citizens willing to stand, even in the rain, to convey their message.
Despite how they have been portrayed, according to Gallup, members of the Tea Party are a remarkable cross-section of American life, diverse, taken as a whole from society at-large. This is surely a sign that The Tea Party movement has tapped into something deeply rooted in the American experience.
There is another story about King: that after the march from Selma to Montgomery he sat in the Montgomery airport and looked around the terminal, taking note of the incredible diversity of people there who had marched with him—white, black, young, old, rich, poor, Northerner, Southerner. This encouraged King and was a sign to him that the Civil Rights movement had moved beyond its original bounds and on was its way to becoming something truly socially redemptive and transforming. King’s name for this was the “Beloved Community.” And it was within this diverse community where America’s ultimate hope lay not with the government against whose oppression he marched from Selma to Montgomery to oppose.
We are again in the midst of a great civil debate about the nature and character of freedom and liberty. One party believes that government is our best hope, that they are the ones we’ve been waiting for and that good intentions make for good government. This is not what has made the American spirit so strong. America’s greatness has always been in her people not in her programs. America’s greatness has been in the town square and the fellowship hall, the small business and the Rotary Club, the Church and the school on the corner. It’s the spirit that flows from these, which truly governs America and makes her great.
King went on to say that promissory note was a guarantor to the inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I do not want to speculate about where Dr. King would fall politically today. But the King of 1963, whose life had been one long struggle against government encroachment, thought to only mention negative rights that day under the shadow of the Washington Monument. A decent home, a fair wage…may have been on King’s mind that day—but as he looked over the assembled crowd, his request for a better society was mainly for government to set them free.
By the way, those marchers too were accused of being violent, unruly and race-baiters.
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