One laughable attempt to discredit last week’s tea parties was the Left’s claim that the original Boston Tea Party was a protest about corporate tax incentives.
I am all for debates about historical interpretation. Perhaps a historian can make an argument substantiating the Left’s interpretation of the Boston Tea Party, but one observes a strong presentist quality in that interpretation.
The best full-length treatment of the event is Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party. Labaree argues that the tea party was a reaction to the sensitive issue of taxation and government authority, namely colonists’ unwillingness to concede that Parliament had the authority to tax them. And even if you place the Boston Tea Party in the context of T.H. Breen’s marketplace (or consumer) revolution, it still holds that the issue of taxation plays a significant role in the protest.
I haven’t read Thomas Bender’s A Nation among Nations, but Lefties would be better off arguing his point that there were “global interactions at work behind the Boston Tea Party.” Of course, that would require the Left to care about historical interpretation, rather than trying to make the tea party protesters look like dummies.
