On occasion I read this blog by a paleoconservative ex-Special Forces colonel who used to be an attache to various Arab militaries. I got started in the habit c. 2006 when he was opposing W's foreign policy from the right, which I thought was interesting, and he knows a lot about the Middle East. But lately he's been the perfect example of how a little bit of historical knowledge, wrongly applied, can be really dangerous.
His view is that the current civic arson in Washington is really just a continuation of 18th century British politics. He incorrectly identifies the Tories on the whole as the Court Party, and the Whigs in general as the Country Party, and asserts that the Tea Partiers are Country Party types in contemporary America. This is wrong on any number of levels.
In reality, what started in the late 1680s as a duopoly between Whigs (opposed to royal authority) and Tories (in support of it) becomes by the early Hanoverian era, a contest between variegated and diverse "Country" and "Court" factions. The Court faction, centered around PM Walpole's friends, contained both Tory landowner grandees and the Whig merchants and financiers of the City of London, advocates of empire and executive power. On the other hand, the Country faction, opposed to the consolidating attempts of the Court and associated with popular elements at home, contained what would later be called "Red Tories" of the small-holding squirearchy, as well as "Old Whig" intellectuals who felt the Whig merchants of the City had sold out the principles of the Glorious Revolution -- the first left-wing intellectuals in history, suggests historian J.G.A. Pocock. So, the Colonel is simply incorrect in his history.
The question, then, is how does that effect his take on contemporary U.S. politics? First, there were practically no descendants of the Court faction among the founders of the American republic; indeed, the Court Party types became Loyalists. Rather, there were varying shades of Country-descended political opinion, with Hamilton's advocates of the moderate Hanoverian Enlightenment on the right, and the Paineite democratic radicals on the left. So the Colonel's desire to paint contemporary Democrats as descendants of Hanoverian courtiers falls flat; such an application would not have even applied to Alexander Hamilton, the most Court-friendly of the Founders, let alone Harry Reid.
What you have instead is the diffraction of America's Country-based political thought into any number of factions, groupings, and tendencies: arch-Federalists like Hamilton or Ames, moderate Federalists like John Adams, intransigent Old Republicans like John Randolph, the pragmatic Republicanism of Jefferson's Administration in power, the National Republicanism of John Quincy Adams or Monroe after the collapse of Federalism after 1815, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy on the wreckage of the Era of Good Feeling, the subsequent rise of the Whig Party in opposition to Jackson, the Nullifiers under Calhoun, etc., etc., etc. The Tea Party most closely resemble Country-descended political groupings that fought against majority rule, primarily in order to defend the slave system and/or white supremacy (Calhoun, the Fire Eaters of the 1850s, the Civil Rights Era Nullifiers like Orval Faubus or George Wallace). Likewise, those most opposed to the Nullifiers et al. have been a motley, but equally Country-descended crew: not only men who had been Whigs in the 1830s, like Abraham Lincoln, but also, and perhaps above all, that very apotheosis of the Country tradition in America, Andrew Jackson -- a portrait of whom hung on Lincoln's Oval Office wall. Indeed, though Jackson added new elements to the Country tradition, such as a fierce defense of majority rule, his devotion to traditional Country doctrines -- limiting government, lest it be used to strengthen established commercial interests at the expense of small yeoman freeholders -- cannot be seriously questioned. Yet even so thoroughly Country a figure as Jackson threatened to use federal power to subjugate and hang the Nullifiers under Calhoun should they act on their threats. Thus, any neat attempt to delineate contemporary American politics based on a deeply flawed misreading of 18th century British politics fails almost immediately when confronted with the historical evidence. The Colonel's comparison, is charitably putting it, confused; a better term might be "incoherent." It is political history's equivalent of a null set or non sequitur -- it does not follow. The analogy simply doesn't apply; it's just not apposite.
My dissertation advisor, a student of American political history, once told me that political doctrines in American history move like multiple intersecting sine waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes. Policies, attitudes, and even personalities migrate from one political grouping to another and then back again. But it is certainly possible to establish the family relations of various ideologies, of the direct line of descent between Calhoun in the 1830s, Yancey and Davis in the 1850s, and Faubus and Wallace in the 1950s - '60s -- and Gohmert and Yoho and Cruz today. You could also trace a line among their opponents, say between Jackson and Lincoln and Eisenhower (who expressed traditional Country fears in his warnings about a military-industrial complex). What you can't do is express 1:1 historical relations based upon fundamentally misinformed misunderstandings of Anglo-American political history.
Indeed, if the Colonel wanted a good contemporary example of Country ideology in action, he could take a look at the recent rebellion in the House, led by Rep. Justin Amash (R - Michigan) and Rep. John Conyers (D - Michigan), against the Executive's lawless spying through the panopticon of the National Security Agency. That bill saw conservative Republicans -- representatives of the rural squirearchy, as it were -- and liberal Democrats -- today's answer to the Old Whig intellectuals -- unite to oppose what they viewed as the overweening power of the State. Like the Country Party of 18th Century Britain, members of both sides of the Two Party duopoly were included. And like the Court Party, their opponents were both Democrats (Pelosi) and Republicans (McCain) inclined to give the Executive near total free reign in the conduct of foreign affairs and war.
What is dangerous is that the Colonel's false genealogies buttress an entirely self-serving and un-self-aware view of the world and of the past, one that justifies the reactionary radicalism of the hard Right with ersatz patriotic bunting. But, in the end, I really should just stop reading the guy. Whatever the Colonel's insights on the Middle East, he loathes and abuses Lincoln, Northerners, urbanites, and any who differ with him. He said monstrous things about the murdered Trayvon Martin. He is a strange sort of Catholic who really doesn't care for people whose sexuality is different than his. He is just an unpleasant man who knows far less than he thinks he does. For all those reasons, I will bid the Colonel adieu, crying "For Lincoln and Liberty, too!", and singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- Truth, indeed, is marching on.
