A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government"?
Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. "Widely regarded by whom?" he challenged, suspiciously. "Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."
Jonathan Chait of the New Republic fills out the rest here.
Ha! Those rubes. How stupid can they be, right?
ReplyDeleteWell between you and me, Berchmans, it's a good thing we've got the Smart Ones© running government. I mean, could you just imagine if people actually understood what they were reading? It would be chaos!
I'm amused by Millbank's total lack of awareness that what "strong central government" means might not be the same now as what it was when Hamilton was advocating it...
ReplyDeleteVM, I love that you heartily echo Armey's ridiculous anti-elitism. Rather than substantively address the point, he points to those dreaded political science "professors," who are of course hell bent on leading America to some new level of totalitarian hell.
ReplyDeletePlease. You like wine just as much as I do, so drop the populist rhetoric. It's entirely possible for people to misunderstand or misread public documents. Again, take the Constitution: when Justice Scalia proposes his originalist method, he says you should read the Constitution as those in the Founding Era would have understood it, not as we do. That requires a fair amount of historical knowledge that is beyond most -- well, at least my -- scope of knowledge.