Harvard's Jill Lepore Ties Jared Loughner to Tea Party 'Constitution Worship'

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Chair of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University. She's also the author of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, a book that "offers a wry and bemused look at American history according to the far right" (published by Princeton University Press). And she's a staff writer at The New Yorker as well, where she's just published an intriguing article on the tea party's "worship" of the U.S. Constitution: "The Commandments."

It's an important article, to be fair, both reasonable and informative. While reading it I thought it might be a useful addition to the first week's readings on my syllabus for Introduction to American Government. (And, interestingly, others had roughly the same thoughts.) That said, I couldn't help noticing the graphic artwork accompanying the piece. I read this in hard copy while out for coffee, and the full 8 ½ by 11 image is quite dramatic. Notice the placement of the American eagle above "We the People." The wings are spread wide and at the breast is a coat-of-arms replicating the colors of the American flag. This isn't an image that's commonly seen at tea parties. In fact, it more closely resembles the Reichsadler, the national insignia of Nazi Germany. This makes sense if we keep in mind the far-left sensibilities of The New Yorker's elitist mindset and readership. That doesn't make it any less disingenuous and reprehensible.

But it gets worse. Noticing that the timing of her publication coincides with the shooting massacre in Tuscon, Lepore posted a blog entry at The New Yorker tying Jared Loughner's ravings on the Constitution to her thesis of the far-right's "cult of the Constitution." And the editors have illustrated the post with the same artistic misrepresentation of the tea parties (screencap here). Lepore of course offers the obligatory disclaimer, twice, that Jared Lee Loughner was clinically insane. And with that task complete, she deploys the same despicable blood libel to smear conservatives and the tea party movement, "Jared Lee Loughner and the Constitution":

Loughner had lost his mind. Early reports have it that he had also posted on his MySpace page a photograph of a U.S. history textbook with a gun on top of it. In September police had to remove him from a classroom at Pima Community College, after he called the syllabus “unconstitutional” and delivered what his professor called “a rant about the Constitution.” In December he posted on YouTube a statement reading, “The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.”

Reading the Constitution, and especially the Second Amendment, is what I happen to have written about in this week’s magazine. I started writing this essay in September, and finished it in December, because I was struck, all fall, by how American political rhetoric had been shifting from a battle over the memory of the Revolution to a contest over the Constitution.

No one knows why Jared Lee Loughner did what he did. Maybe no one will ever know. No one can explain madmen with guns. There’s a corridor at the John F. Kennedy Library where the walls are painted black and where television monitors play, night and day, a single scene: Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death. He takes his glasses off; he looks at the clock; he puts his glasses back on. He takes them off. He says not a word. And then, he puts his glasses back on.

Again, notice the rank dishonesty. "No one knows why" Loughner did what he did, but despite that Lepore and The New Yorker have gone above and beyond the left's call of duty to firmly place him within the ranks of the alleged tea party "cult of the Constitution."

And there's some additional background. It turns out that Lepore spoke at a panel discussion on the "Tea Party" at the 2010 New Yorker Festival at DGA Theater in October. The festival was cited at the Toronto Star in November, where Lepore is interviewed: "The U.S. Constitution as Celebrity." The piece shines additional light on the thinking of the progressives elites:

“What we're seeing at the Tea Party rallies is a comic-book, American heritage version of the past that comes in defiance of historical analysis,” says Jill Lepore, an award-winning Harvard University history professor and staff writer with The New Yorker.

“It is in some ways a religious revival for an America that simply never was. The founders, the framers of the Constitution, believed in skepticism and reason and inquiry, working with a set of ideas that came from the Enlightenment. It was reason against passion. And so to just sort of revere the Constitution with religious fervour, waving it around like a talisman, is antithetical to the document itself.”

Lepore tackles the issue head-on in her new book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, and comes away with considerable nuance. Combining interviews with Tea Partiers and her own scholarly study of America's founding era, she traces the Tea Party's roots to the bicentennial of the 1970s, when few Americans could agree on how to tell the messy story of the country's beginnings.

Then, as now, the U.S. roiled with divisions that Lepore believes are driving today's Tea Party movement.

“Vietnam, Kent Sate, Watergate, all those assassinations — it was a time when it felt really bad to be American, and a portion of our population never really got to the other side of the crisis,” Lepore told the Toronto Star in an interview this week.

“They've been looking all this time for a way to feel good about it again. And I find it heartbreaking that there are these people who felt they lost touch with the meaning of American until they found it in the Tea Party movement. It's sad because, as an historian, I do have a narrative of the meaning of America that I find very powerful — but I guess I and my colleagues haven't done a good enough job of sharing it.”

We've long seen how tea party envy has been a common theme for the Obama era (the "coffee party," for example), and in Lepore's interview we see the lament that academic elites have failed to tap the tea party's populist vibrancy. And so, when people and movements find themselves failing to be on the right side of history (like the progressives), they lash out. They attack and disparage. And they engage in libelous accusations that work to destroy any efforts at civil debate they purportedly claim to champion. All of this is hardly surprisingly, although it's certainly dispiriting, in one way after another.

Anyway, William Jacobson's got related thoughts, "The False Narrative Of Tea Party Violence Attempts Suicide." And Instapundit on "heated rhetoric." Plus, at American Spectator, "Mark Levin's $100,000 Challenge to Chris Matthews." (via Memeorandum).

Finally, at The Other McCain, "How to Talk to a Follower of the Zeitgeist Cult (If You Must)."