Black Tea

Oh dear, oh, dear, oh dear, Dan Hannan:

"Other countries are defined by territory, language, religion, ethnicity. Yours is defined by a constitution, and the dream of liberty that found form in that constitution. You don’t have to be American to share that dream, which is why the world has a stake in your success."

Neocon rubbish, and even they don't actually believe it. It looks as if Hannan really does. National Review readers might note his view that America is not at all defined by territory, language, religion or ethnicity. On religion, the Tea Partiers about whom he is so enthusiastic seem to be going back to the ritualised Deism of the Founding Fathers' Freemasonry, the symbols of which adorn American banknotes to this day. But they certainly regard some sort of religion, even if it only that, as fundamental to America. Never mind territory, language and ethnicity. At least some of them will also come round, if only because of the financial costs involved in the alternative, to the Founding Fathers' own view that, while expansion to encompass the entire North American continet was one thing, their project was in no sense designed for export to anywhere else. Both Hannan's reading of English Whiggery, and his view of the extremely anti-Hanoverian American Republic as an expression of it, are also way off, as is his strange fascination with the Contract with America, the only significant effect of which was to deliver Bill Clinton's second term.

As surely as the "Republican Revolutionaries" got behind the decidedly unrevolutionary Bob Dole in 1996, so the colourful characters whom the Tea Party looks set to send to Washington will get behind whoever either the Old Establishment or the neocon New Establishment anoints in 2012. Rooted profoundly in territory, language, religion and ethnicity, the real action is going to be elsewhere. There are many good reasons to want Charlie Crist in the Senate, not the least of which is that he is not Marco Rubio. Bluntly, there are many good reasons not to want Kendrick Meek, even though he is the only African-American with any realistic chance of getting in this year. But, in and around the person of ex-Congressman Robert Wexler, another Democrat, the B'nai B'rith, AIPAC and ADL traitors and spies are going hell for leather to keep the Senate n-free by encouraging support for Crist. It looks as if they are going to be successful.

This once, that might be no bad thing. The entirely correct rage in response to it would prevent Rahm Emanuel from being nominated for Mayor of Chicago, and the obvious choice among those who would feel that rage would be James T. Meeks, whose nomination and election in "the capital of black America" would set the ball rolling for numerous other candidates, initially black, but by no means exclusively so before very long at all. The Mossadems would be prominent among those cleared out, and Hillary Clinton would take the hint.

Thus would a genuinely popular and populist movement genuinely transform one party by bringing it back to mainstream opinion: no exportation of jobs to Third World sweatshops, no importation of those sweatshops themselves, America as an English-speaking country, the New Deal and the Great Society, their logical extension to universal public healthcare, the protection of human life at every stage, the traditional definition of marriage, active government support for family life based on that institution, constitutional liberties, wars only to defend American interests, no entangling alliances abroad, and the agricultural and manufacturing bases rebuilt in American ownership and defended, like all (yes, all) of the foregoing, by powerful unions.