Destruction of the Tea

Institutions should not be judged by the failures of their participants. Adultery should not define marriage, nor should hypocrisy define religion. Higher education ought not be disdained on the basis of some poor professors, and we cannot allow ourselves to become jaded to the idea of a good and constitutional government because of the failings of those politicians who profane their high calling.

We have in our Constitution possibly the most remarkable institution ever created by men, The Republic of the United States of America. The magic of the Constitution is that it recognizes a higher authority than the government it created, that there are “natural laws” and that our elected officials would be stewards of those laws, and not Kings at all. Youths and political simpletons cyclically suggest direct democracy as an alternative to the complexity of our constitutional system. Government by poll, majority rules… always, and the minority submits, always. I suppose in its purest form there would be no need for Presidents, or Congress, just bureaucrats to count the vote, and police to enforce it. Thankfully, most Americans understand the impracticality of such a system, but the simple idea of “majority rules”, as a vestige of the way we thought as children, is a persistent simplification of the way government should work. Governor Cuomo’s recent faux pas regarding “extreme conservatives” (as he called them) having no place in New York demonstrates a sad lack of understanding for what America is all about. Likewise, President Obama during the poorly labeled “negotiations” on the stimulus arrogantly marked his territory by proclaiming “I won”, as though that meant he was now King.

Clearly, winning elections should result in having more power in the halls of government, otherwise what’s the point in voting? But the simplistic bullying mentality that sees winning an election as the equivalent of a coronation, envisions a government by natural selection, where the strongest gang owns the territory, and by that logic we will all eventually be ruled by predators… the law of the jungle. Our forefathers saw a better way. A way where even the minority could continue to have some kind of representation, albeit diminished by their loss in the election, but continuing to provide a check to the danger of an elected tyrant. When Congress is allowed to change rules to soften that check, when the President circumvents resistance by the use of orders and rules instead of legislation, and when our lawmakers encourage the use of governmental agencies to help destroy their opposition, we are in danger of losing our mooring, and being set adrift on the sea of political warfare where there are no standards nor honor.

Increasingly our politicians see their opposition as obstacles, enemies, and conquered subjects, rather than citizens whom they are obligated to serve and represent despite their opposition. Like so much of our culture, we have moved from a spirit of cooperation and respectful competition, to one of domination, aggressive posturing, and destruction of all dissent. Every minority cannot be entirely accommodated, but increasingly our governments seem to operate less by consensus and more by conquest. In a country almost evenly divided on so many issues, that insures that large segments of the electorate feel unrepresented and unserved. It’s one thing for a family to vote on who gets the biggest piece of pie; it’s quite another to decide that someone should get no pie at all, ever. While this issue is hardly restricted to one single party, rhetoric like that of President Obama and Governor Cuomo only reaffirms the sense that if we disagree with our leaders, if we oppose them, then they will seek to silence us, neuter us, relegate us to an inconsequential underclass, or even eliminate us. That’s not freedom. That’s not America.

Just before the Revolution similar things were happening. The government of England was in bed with the East India Company for the highly lucrative tea trade. East India was awarded a monopoly and the British government collected exorbitant taxes on the tea. The problem, as always, was that people don’t like being ripped off and ignored by their government. They protested, boycotted, bought local tea, and smuggled Dutch tea. Only with the help of government intervention in the marketplace can a company with a monopoly on a popular product wind up in jeopardy of bankruptcy, and that’s exactly what was happening to the East India Company. The answer then, as it seems to be today, was more government intervention; bailouts, hidden taxes, regulations, mandates, influence peddling; crony capitalism at its worst. The colonies protested the tax on the basis that it was enacted without their interests being represented, not so much because of this single tax, but because it forebode a future where England would use this model to extort money from the Colonies for all manner of products. Indeed when England found a way to make East India’s tea sell for less than the smuggled tea while still retaining the tax, the colonies rejected the idea; it wasn’t about the money, it was about having a voice. The result was what John Adams termed “the destruction of the tea in Boston”, and what we now call The Boston Tea Party. If our governments continue to trample the opposition contrary to the spirit of liberty and constitutional representation, it can expect more popular nullification of the actions they take, more civil disobedience, more calls for “the destruction of the tea”.

IMHO: A President once elected is the President of all the people, even the ones who did not vote for him. The same is true of the Governor. The voters can’t reject their leadership only on the basis of not having voted for them, but more importantly, the leader can’t reject whole segments of the electorate just because they disagree on a few issues. When the dissent follows geographical lines as in Upstate New York with the Safe Act, or red state rejection of Obamacare, we draw near to the place where John Adams would say “This meeting can do nothing further to save this country”, popularly believed to be the signal for the tea party to begin.

Government, like all institutions, can be done well, very well, but not by men who choose to demonize their opposition rather than try to serve them. These are those whose agendas have become more important than the citizens, whose vision of the future is endangering the hope for one, whose political ambitions have clouded their love of country. If we cannot select better leaders than this, then government will become our burden to bear, instead of our champion.

Good government is hard to find, just like a good spouse, a good church, or a good education. Maybe if we weren’t so attracted to shiny objects; things that have nothing to do with leadership or service, and more attracted to inner light and character, then all these things would come easier to us. We must stop giving power to men who would be kings, and find leaders who will lead us all, not just their friends and supporters. We must shrink the size and scope of government so that the stakes and reach of power are diminished and less likely to corrupt, or once corrupted, less likely to destroy. Brilliant stars of leadership are rare in our history, a handful surrounded by a field of varying mediocrity, but the few we have had have been enough to preserve us, arising as if by destiny at our times of greatest need. Perhaps less important than a leader that is perfect on every policy is one that can be viewed by all as our commander rather than our conqueror, with a heart to protect our liberty rather than fundamentally transform it, willing to convince people, not coerce them. Becoming the stronger gang is not the answer; restoring the “united” in the United States is.