The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist. It is also Disneyfied, sentimentalized, and whitewashed
Tea Partiers love mentioning Thomas Paine because they think they share his "Common Sense" (otherwise known as a sense held in common) but they haven't bothered to read it, and are clearly unfamiliar with essays such as "Public Good", in which Paine wrote that, especially while at war (as America currently is, of course): "To have a clear idea of taxation is necessary to every country, and the more funds we can discover and organise, the less will be the hope of the enemy."
As Harvard historian Jill Lepore argued last year in her brilliant The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, none of the people voting for the Tea Party candidates knows any of this because they haven't studied American history since grade school, when all American schoolchildren learn a simplified, cartoon version of the American Revolution (which we would never call the "War of Independence").
It is a Sesame Street version of the American constitution and politics, a myth that is being treated as the alpha and omega of our political and legal reality. This is one reason why it has a quasi-religious aspect: it's a myth of genesis, it's a creation myth about America that is just as simple as the idea that God created man and woman: the Founding Fathers created America.
The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist: it is also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is "the greatest nation in the world". They take solace in tautology: America is great – this they know – because Fox News tells them so.
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