1: Tea Party partisans deride Occupy Wall Street as a "mob." It's not like I expect Sean Hannity to read Gary Nash, but seriously. I can't even wrap my head around the idea of someone simultaneously embracing the Boston Tea Party as the height of patriotism and rejecting crowd actions — mobs — as inherently unlawful/illegitimate/bad.
2: Lee Fang at ThinkProgress argues that Occupy Wall Street is the real heir to the Boston Tea Party. His particular arguments aside for the moment, why does this matter as much as it does? Why isn't it enough to be right in the present? What do progressive movements gain by appealing to the authority of the past? Arguing over who really embodies the legacy of the Founders sounds like Civil War-era posturing — why is it still so effective today?
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