Today's Tea Party - Yesterday's Federalists?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by James Traub entitled "The Tea Party's Path to Irrelevance."

The article contains a number of insights into premodern American politics. While I consider myself reasonably well informed on current American politics and history dating back to at least the Kennedy administration, my understanding gets increasingly hazy moving from Eisenhower to Truman to FDR to Hoover to Coolidge to Harding; by the time we reach Wilson, my knowledge of U.S. involvement in World War I is again, I think, reasonably good. However, when it comes to U.S. domestic politics in those days, my knowledge could be fairly described as paltry; from Wilson back, it's practically nonexistent.

This article describes Jefferson as a strong proponent of the concept of limited government; Jefferson belonged to the Republican party of the day, which bears no resemblance to the Republican party of the present. His opponents were the Federalists, advocates of a strong federal government. They wanted a federation of states, which presupposes a strong federal government; Jefferson and others wanted a confederacy of states, where state power was predominant and federal power much less.

The Federalists claimed to represent the interests of the entire country, but actually their power structure was centered on the New England states, and they firmly opposed what they saw as Jefferson's "coup": the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Looking at it from a present-day perspective, it seems absurd that a national political party could be so short-sighted as to oppose the enormous expansion of American power and influence attained by the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, the Federalists opposed it -- because they saw it as an enormous dilution of New England's power over the entire nation. There would be a great shift in political power as the new territories (in a slave-owning part of the country) demanded their fair representation in government.

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

So the Federalists pursued their futile attempt to resist the imperatives forced upon them by demography:

Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years.

The Federalists finally collapsed in the fall of 1814 when a convention they called split on the question of whether or not to remain in the Union. Jefferson's political descendants, on the other hand, were swept along on the wave of history resulting from the Louisiana Purchase, allying themselves with the immigrant settlers who represented the interests of the agrarian South.

Their standard-bearer in 1828, Andrew Jackson, favored tariffs and “internal improvements” like roads and canals, the big-government programs of the day. The new party, known first as the Democratic-Republicans, and then simply as the Democrats, thrashed Adams that year. (Adams’s party, the National Republicans, gave way to the Whigs, which in turn evolved into the modern Republican Party.)

Traub draws a parallel between the Federalists' futile resistance to inevitable change and the opposition of Tea Party conservatives to the wave of immigrants the U.S. must deal with today. Today's immigration problem is a situation that cannot be described as "unfortunate": It's a situation that was forced by decades of failure to deal with immigration reform. Reagan's amnesty of 1986 should have been an irresistible wake-up call for reform; the opportunity was lost by the political cowardice of those who preferred the head-in-the-sand approach.

The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them.

The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten.