At Civl War Memory, Kevin Levin writes about a new book by the historian Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, primarily to highlight her concept of "historic fundamentalism."
From Lepore:
Historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past-”the founding”-is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts-”the founding documents”-are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible. (p. 16)
This jibes with Andrew Sullivan's earlier take that the Tea Party is "an essentially cultural revolt against what America is becoming: a multi-racial, multi-faith, gay-inclusive, women-friendly, majority-minority country. The 'tea-party' analogy is not about restricting government as much as it is a form of almost pathological nostalgia."
See here for my earlier posting on the topic, the essence of which is this:
Ghost Dance fever raged among "the more recently defeated Indians of the Great Plains" and other tribes from 1889 to 1891. The revitalization movement was led by a Northern Paiute named Wovoka.
[Wovoka's] pronouncements heralded the dawning of a new age, in which whites would vanish, leaving Indians to live in a land of material abundance, spiritual renewal and immortal life. Like many millenarian visions, Wovoka's prophecies stressed the link between righteous behavior and imminent salvation. Salvation was not to be passively awaited but welcomed by a regime of ritual dancing and upright moral conduct.
If only Sarah can get us all to ghost dance a bit harder, soon America will be the white man's paradise it once was.