History tricked the Tea Party

History tricked the Tea Party

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Thoreau concluded “Civil Disobedience” by “imagining a State” that would let a few people

live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
It would be a state of perfect Transcendentalist anarchy, where everyone would fulfill all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men not because they were following the government’s laws but because they were letting nature take its course within them, living deep and sucking all the marrow out of life.

Today’s right-wing extremists would probably run from Thoreau’s view of life even faster than from Jefferson’s. But there is no denying that their obsession with shrinking government stands in a long, distinguished line of American tradition where these two luminaries shine so bright.

Those same right-wingers would probably run fastest of all from another luminary, Walt Whitman, who was surely marching to his own drummer when he rhapsodized about his own transcendental moments: “From this hour, freedom! From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines.” Where the Tea Party would erect fences stronger and higher, Whitman would have every fence torn down.