Throughout the unnecessary and destructive debt-ceiling fiasco we’ve experienced over the past few months, expressions of bafflement about the Tea Party fanatics have recurred. Essentially, the expressions amount to a puzzled lament about whether Tea Partyists know what they’re doing.
Quite bluntly, the response is: Yes, they know what they’re doing; yes, they know the consequences; and yes, those consequences are what they’re after. Which still leaves open the “why.”
The reason for the ongoing intransigence of Tea Partyists and their Republican fellow travelers became clearer to me months ago when I realized that, for all their declarations about and paeans to constitutional originalism or strict construction or The Founders’ intent or Gadsden flagism, the answer to “why” lies not in parsing The Founders' sentiments, but in an opposing source: The Anti-Federalist Papers, available online (e.g., here, here, here, and here), in print (e.g., here, here, here, and here), in e-book (e.g., here), and in audiobook (e.g., here and here). Filtering the modern Tea Party through The Anti-Federalist Papers rather than through The Founders yields, in my view, a better understanding of our current dilemmas and frustrations: the Tea Partyists are, essentially, carrying on the fight of those who, long ago, urged rejection of the Constitution itself. If your political DNA derives from the Anti-Founders and the Anti-Constitutionalists, why would intransigence and the diminution, possibly even the destruction, of the constitutional regime look like a problem to you? In the Tea Partyist world, intransigence, diminution, and destruction qualify as a feature, not a bug.
Postscript: In looking for online versions of The Anti-Federalist Papers, I was struck by the political tenor of the sources that popped up high in the search results: at best, an occasional neutral academic site, but mostly sites with a clear rightward tilt. None of the sites appeared to reflect a progressive or liberal or even modestly left-leaning viewpoint. So where are our one-stop repositories of historical documents competing with repositories hosted by right-wing authoritarian centers? We need repositories that (if hosted by popular sites like Daily Kos or a consortium of like-minded sites) will rise high in the search results and provide ready access to not only well-known documents, but to sources that reveal important threads of American history that too many people have forgotten or never learned and that right-wing autocrats and plutocrats would happily consign to the memory hole. A project — a Library for a Real America — for the next Netroots Nation to ponder, perhaps?