Exploring Interdisciplinarity

Several weeks ago, I read an article reporting that Dick Cheney feared the rise of the Tea Party. The reason? Focusing on Rand Paul’s politics, the news story claimed that Paul was too conservative for Cheney. I tried the idea out for size. But deep inside, I suspected otherwise. Was it possible, instead, that Rand Paul might be too radical for conservative republicans, as we now know them?

Might not the Teaparty be too radical for conservative republicans?

At first, It was only an impression, inspired by books I had read years ago. Intrigued, I decided to revisit them. First up was Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, an elaborate story featuring classic Dickens characters that builds upon and derives its intrigue from people and events that traverse the shadowy backdrop of the French and English revolutions. Recalling a germane passage in the novel, I now sought it out.

Like most other Dickens novels, The Tale of Two Cities is a cliffhanger. So I read it transfixed until three in the morning, when I finally came across the key scene that I was looking for. You may recall it.

In this scene, the character Sydney Carton, who although he is about to take the hero, Darnay’s, place at the guillotine, is inspired by a vision of a peaceful Paris, a heaven on earth, in which many of the bloodthirsty revolutionaries–including the irrepressibly vengeful Madame Defarge–will share in his same fate. I wonder, is this what Dick Cheney had in mind?

In search of more clues, I turned to historian Crane Briton‘s classic analysis, The Anatomy of a Revolution, a book I had first read while in graduate school at Columbia. Employing as his lens, the course a fever runs, Brinton compares the French, English, Russian, and American revolutions in terms of the following stages: precursor situations and events; the rise and rule of the moderates; the accession of the extremists; the reign of terror, and the thermidor reaction. It is uncanny how many parallels Brinton was able to draw, but even more so when we compare these parallels to our own situation today.

Consider, for example, the rumblings leading up to all of these revolutions. As Brinton notes, there was growing resistance to excessive taxation; increased outrage about injustices and inequality; a loss not only of government legitimacy but also of the rationale for government itself. While catalytic events may have set the revolutionaries into motion, the driving force that sustained them was a radical utopian vision–much like that held by Sydney Carton–of what a post revolutionary future might be like. Does it sound familiar?

To hear echos of these phrases today, one need only listen to the metaphysical tone that underlies much of the Tea Party rhetoric. As journalist J.M. Bernstein describes:

The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief. More than their political ideas, it is the anger of Tea Party members that is already reshaping our political landscape.

If you need further convincing, take a look at Bill Kauffman‘s Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals, a sympathetic, and somewhat nostalgic, perspective, which not only puts the Tea Party’s philosophy in perspective but also aligns it with some of the idealistic anarchism of the past.

Granted, Former Vice President Dick Cheney is not known for his academic erudition. But let’s take a leap of faith, and assume that he has read Dickens and Brinton in the past. Might he have good reason to be afraid of the Tea Party. I would think so. As the 17th/18th century revolutions show us, entrenched, traditional authorities have always sought to remain in power by reaching out to the moderates; the moderates have overtaken the traditional conservatives by reaching out to the radicals; whereas the radicals have toppled governments with the help of the mob. If the Republicans build their future political campaigns on the foundation of the new reactionary radicals, are the Tea Party gang likely to do otherwise?

On Technorati: A Tale of Two Cities, Bill Kaufman, Charles Dickens, conservative republicans, Dick Cheney, Look Homeward America, Reactionary Radicals, Teaparty