Ghosts of Daniel Shays: Historians Have Begun Trying to Explain the Tea Party Movement, Unfortunately

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In The Whites of Their Eyes, the leading example of an effort gone mostly wrong, Harvard professor Jill Lepore places the Tea Party movement's demands for a return to founding principles alongside a description of Revolutionary era slavery. She concludes that the current obsession with a set of Founding Fathers stripped clean of their historical racism reveals "a fantasy of an America before race, without race."

Lepore decides that this fantasy is driven by a psychological yearning for "the remembrance of childhood" as a "bulwark against a divided present." In other words, Tea Partiers are trying to hide in a false past from the complexity of the real present. If you're worried about deficit spending and …