Who is a Tea Partier?
Surrounded by the silence of a cool winter night, three ships nestled within the peaceful, warming waters of Boston Harbor. All at once, with a sudden shriek, the serenity that encompassed the harbor had all but shattered as colonists dressed in Indian garb marched onto and seized three British ships. Under the warlike, fiery gaze of the constellation Orion, the disguised colonists, determined in their resolve, dumped 342 crates of Britain’s finest tea in the bottomless depths of Boston Harbor (“Boston Tea Party” 1).
Although the famous historical event occurred around two hundred years ago, the significance behind the Boston Tea Party has influenced one of America’s notable political movements today, the Tea Party. In …show more content…
Because Tea Partiers implement core values and beliefs by conducting a political movement bent on societal reform, a Tea Partier can be characterized as a conservative, lobbyist, and deviant.
Serving the purpose to balance the system of governance, Tea Partiers entail moderation in taxes and limited government as conservative ideals that reinforce constitutional and egalitarian order. For example, Jill Lepore discusses the parallels between the Tea Party Movement and American revolutionary acts in the Christian Science Monitor news cover article, “Tea and Sympathy.” Tea Partier Rick Santelli is quoted for his outrage in response to the government’s bailout plan, as he asserts, ‘How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves!’” (Lepore 2). In reference to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the Tea Partier alluded to the years that predated and lead to the formation of the Constitution. The country's first constitution, The Articles of Confederation, also known as the Law of the Land, restricted government collection of tax. In order to ratify the Constitution and gain standing among …show more content…
Tea Partiers violate this norm through patriotic defiance, as presented in the article, “Tea Party Protests: Could They Rally Change in Government?” Patrik Jonsson, an Atlanta based correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, records a notable incident in Washington, when someone threw a box of tea bags over the White House fence, “forcing police to disperse the crowd and bring out a robotic bomb-sniffer.” This incident, notwithstanding, caused the White House to issue a federal tax cut for 95 % Americans under President Obama's plan (Jonsson 1). Due to social strains placed on citizens, many feel that acting against the government is a way to manage the strain and conduct social change. Evidently, the citizen’s deviant yet symbolic act of throwing tea over the fence pressured the government to take action by relieving issues through a temporary tax cut. As another societal dysfunction, Thomas Eddlem Primar, research director and freelance writer of history resource books, explains how a government shutdown was caused by Tea Party conservatives who “backed a House bill tying continued government funding to a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of a tax to pay for it” in the text, “Government Shutdown.”
Surrounded by the silence of a cool winter night, three ships nestled within the peaceful, warming waters of Boston Harbor. All at once, with a sudden shriek, the serenity that encompassed the harbor had all but shattered as colonists dressed in Indian garb marched onto and seized three British ships. Under the warlike, fiery gaze of the constellation Orion, the disguised colonists, determined in their resolve, dumped 342 crates of Britain’s finest tea in the bottomless depths of Boston Harbor (“Boston Tea Party” 1).
Although the famous historical event occurred around two hundred years ago, the significance behind the Boston Tea Party has influenced one of America’s notable political movements today, the Tea Party. In …show more content…
Because Tea Partiers implement core values and beliefs by conducting a political movement bent on societal reform, a Tea Partier can be characterized as a conservative, lobbyist, and deviant.
Serving the purpose to balance the system of governance, Tea Partiers entail moderation in taxes and limited government as conservative ideals that reinforce constitutional and egalitarian order. For example, Jill Lepore discusses the parallels between the Tea Party Movement and American revolutionary acts in the Christian Science Monitor news cover article, “Tea and Sympathy.” Tea Partier Rick Santelli is quoted for his outrage in response to the government’s bailout plan, as he asserts, ‘How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves!’” (Lepore 2). In reference to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the Tea Partier alluded to the years that predated and lead to the formation of the Constitution. The country's first constitution, The Articles of Confederation, also known as the Law of the Land, restricted government collection of tax. In order to ratify the Constitution and gain standing among …show more content…
Tea Partiers violate this norm through patriotic defiance, as presented in the article, “Tea Party Protests: Could They Rally Change in Government?” Patrik Jonsson, an Atlanta based correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, records a notable incident in Washington, when someone threw a box of tea bags over the White House fence, “forcing police to disperse the crowd and bring out a robotic bomb-sniffer.” This incident, notwithstanding, caused the White House to issue a federal tax cut for 95 % Americans under President Obama's plan (Jonsson 1). Due to social strains placed on citizens, many feel that acting against the government is a way to manage the strain and conduct social change. Evidently, the citizen’s deviant yet symbolic act of throwing tea over the fence pressured the government to take action by relieving issues through a temporary tax cut. As another societal dysfunction, Thomas Eddlem Primar, research director and freelance writer of history resource books, explains how a government shutdown was caused by Tea Party conservatives who “backed a House bill tying continued government funding to a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of a tax to pay for it” in the text, “Government Shutdown.”