Transcending Politics: What Emerson Would Teach The Tea Party

The transcendentalist wrote, “Genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead.” It’s a lesson the Tea Party would do well to learn.

The Tea Party’s political interest isn’t restricted to just the ballot box. From conservative finance mistress Ayn Rand to liberal poet Allen Ginsberg, the grassroots movement has invoked long-dead authors for disparate answers to today’s political problems. If they’re truly concerned with the nation’s future, the Tea Party will put Ralph Waldo Emerson at the top of its collective reading list.

Those who recall their high school English remember Emerson as the grandfather of transcendentalism. He was an orator with a religious adoration of nature, one that verged on the infantile. “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,” reads a typical sentence in Emerson’s seminal work, “Nature.” “His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food.”

While Emerson comes off as something of a 19th century hippie, such an elementary reading overlooks the writer’s deeply patriotic, anti-establishment politics and quest for small government driven by intuition. Both concepts, I think, square quite nicely with the Tea Party’s small government, “common sense” ideals.

Like the Tea Party, Emerson deeply distrusted the government. It has been exploited and perverted by political parties that stand “for the defense of those interests in which they find themselves.”

“[Their leaders] reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle,” Emerson asserts in his 1844 essay, “Politics,” sounding a lot like Sarah Palin, who on Saturday celebrated the Tea Party with similar rhetoric. “The Tea Party is a beautiful movement,” she said. “It’s held both sides of the aisle accountable, and both parts of the GOP and the Democrat machine, they don’t know what to do with the Tea Party America.” And, like Palin, Emerson believes a determined populace can set the state straight.

“A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions,” he writes, before celebrating the Tea Party’s favorite heroes—colonial revolutionaries.

Smaller government, yes, would help end corruption, says Emerson, “The less government we have, the better, – the fewer laws, and the less confided power.” But he also points out that political institutions are build by the people — “Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men” — and therefore the first step in a state’s salvation is “self-government.”

Self-government is “purely moral,” claims Emerson, much as Beck describes his ideological 9/12 Project as “honorable,” because, “[Self-government] was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party, and unites him, at the same time, to the race.”

This ideal self-government cannot be fabricated out of thin air, of course: individuals must take steps toward becoming the ultimate citizen, a being referred to as both the “Man Thinking” and “the wise man.”

“The antidote to this abuse of formal Government,” instructs Emerson, “is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.”

Emerson’s ideas about the “wise man,” the “Man Thinking,” were in fact mapped out seven years before Politics’ publication, in his 1837 speech, “An American Scholar,” which took aim at the establishment and caused a sensation when first delivered at Harvard.

To become a “man thinking,” Emerson told the audience at Cambridge, requires three things: knowledge, action and nature. Tea Party adherents are perfect candidates for such an endeavor.

As their voracious literary appetite indicates, the Tea Party’s well on its way in the acquisition of knowledge. And, as primary results show, the movement’s pretty good at activism, which helps turn knowledge into “truth.” “Without [action] thought can never ripen into truth,” Emerson said in his speech. “The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by as a loss of power.” But action and knowledge cannot thrive, or even exist, without Emerson’s most important ingredient, nature, which brings us back to “Emerson the hippie.”

Elementary readings of Emerson’s theories don’t get to the meat of his philosophy. Nature isn’t just leaves and trees. Nature influences, indirectly or directly, every aspect of our society. It influences our language, and therefore our laws, and even and our morals. “The moral law lies at the centre of nature,” says Emerson in Nature.

In the end of one’s organic exploration, they should have tapped into their organic intuition to realize, as Emerson said at Harvard, “It is one soul which animates all men.”

This concept of nature, of omnipresent benevolence, shouldn’t be too foreign for the Tea Party movement, nearly half of which identify with the Christian or religious right, a population not unfamiliar with awe-inspiring power.

Intuition, knowledge and naturally good morals help combat selfishness, leading citizens toward the liberation of their government from self-interested corruption. The Tea Party, in theory, should be ready to go, Emerson in hand, to forge a more promising future. But that’s the key word, the word that brings Emerson and the Tea Party into conflict, the word that could teach the Tea Party the ultimate Emerson lesson: “future.”

Emerson would of course approve of the Tea Party’s educational pursuits. He did say, after all, “Books are the best type of the influence of the past.” But that knowledge, in order to properly be converted into positive action, is forward thinking. The Tea Party, which relies on Constitutional Constructionism, a static reading of laws that ignores cultural expansion, does not look forward. They do not understand what Emerson, writing in the throes of abolition and the Civil War, and often against racial oppression, could see quite clearly: our democracy was never perfect.

“This is the history of governments – one man does something which is to bind another,” writes Emerson sounding quite like Tea Party leaders. “A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence.”

Laws, written by men and women motivated by self-interest, are flawed. They therefore must be constantly challenged toward a more egalitarian, “common sense” end. Laws, Emerson insists, are “alterable:” “The law is only a memorandum. The statute stands there to say, ‘Yesterday we agreed so and so,’ but how feel ye this article today?”

When Tea Party candidates like Utah’s Mike Lee, who’s running for Senate, says that the 17th amendment, which allowed popular election of Senators, goes against the Constitution — well, clearly he doesn’t see laws in the same light as Emerson.

If our government’s going to grow, and if the Tea Party’s going to help, then citizens need to get in touch with their inner Emerson to realize that the “wise man” only proves effective when inspired by actual progress, not archaic regurgitations.

As that transcendentalist hippie wrote, “Genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead.” And that, friends, is Emerson’s ultimate lesson, and could spin the Tea Party off in a far more inclusive, progressive direction.