Legal Commentary

One of the happier byproducts of the Texas School Board's campaign against "liberalism" in textbooks was the alienation of Texas conservatives from Jefferson. I call this a happy development, because, as a conservative myself, I am perpetually annoyed by conservatives' willingness to embrace anyone with a periwig and 18th century diction as one of their intellectual ancestors. Modern Tea-Party types need to realize that their mixture of beliefs -- libertarianism, suspicion of both financial and intellectual elites amounting to anti-intellectualism, dislike of financial corporations, fear of centralization, belief in a republic of small property-holders, obsession with the right to bear arms, paranoia about taxation -- comes from a deeply rooted but contrarian Country Party tradition that is actually at odds with most of the iconic figures from the American founding that they embrace.

Take, for instance, Glenn Beck's effort to appropriate Thomas Paine as the inspiration for Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government. I assume that Beck's beliefs are roughly libertarian, pro-"Christian" in some sense, and generally anti-redistributivist. Paine, by contrast, was (1) a tax-and-spend liberal who (for instance) wrote six pamphlets defending the proposed national 5% impost against its small-government attackers in Rhodes Island; (2) an egalitarian who called for redistribution of land in his pamphlet, Agrarian Justice; (3) a Deist who ridiculed the Bible as a pack of socially destructive lies in The Age of Reason; (4) a self-proclaimed centralizer who teamed up with Pennsylvania Federalists like Robert and Gouvernour Morris to press for a powerful and consolidated national government; and (5) a citizen of the world who participated in the French Revolution and called on America to receive the fugitive from abroad (to the irritation of John Adams who denounced "the disciples of Thomas Paine" to John Marshall as European intellectual riff-raff -- "a company of schoolmasters, painters, and poets" -- more undesirable as immigrants than Caliban and Ariel "with a troop of spirits the most mischievous from fairy land").

So why does Beck want to associate with Paine when other conservatives are dumping Deist founders like Thomas Jefferson as alien to their conservative beliefs? I assume that Beck simply has no idea what Paine really wrote or believed: He just needed a historical reference that readers of bestsellers could dimly recognize as vaguely 18th century. But, rather than pick the one guy from the 18th century that stands opposed to all of his beliefs, I'd urge Beck to popularize neglected American writers who really embraced Tea-Party sentiments: He ought to embrace those backwoodsy Anti-Federalist oddballs described so well by Saul Cornell -- guys like William Findley and (albeit much more moderately) Melanchton Smith. These were the founders who hated international law, disliked banking corporations, were paranoid about national government's power, and despised the nationalist intellectual elites of Boston, New York, and Princeton. They were obsessed with the right to bear arms and deeply suspicious of taxation of any sort. Unlike Paine, they campaigned against aid to the Bank of North America and the 5% impost.

So come on, Tea Partiers: Reclaim your Anti-Federalist roots. Dump Paine, Hamilton, Madison, and the rest of those tax-and-spend, cosmopolitan, deist, elitist nationalizers along with Tom ("Wall o' Separation") Jefferson. The Anti-Federalists, your true ancestors, await your re-discovery of them.