William Hogeland calls Sarah Palin and the tea-partiers out on their description of the ordinary freedoms enjoyed by Americans during the Founding period as equivalent to a sort of Chicago School free marketarianism. Native Americans, women, and slaves weren't the only groups suffering from limited rights--ordinary white male workers were also in a constant struggle against the wealthy elite land and business owners who had the main voice in town and country. Fighting for a democratic egalitarianism that would give them fair economic rights, they objected to unfettered mercantile interests and urged progressive reforms such as social security, progressive taxation, and regulation. See Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman would call 18th-century Philadelphia Freedom Fighters Un-American, New Deal 2.0, Feb. 21, 2011.
Securing true liberty, working Americans of the founding period insisted, requires government to regulate business and finance in the interest of economic fairness. They demanded such things as debt relief, an end to the regressive gold standard, the severing of rights from property, and legal curtailment of mercantile interests. Some wanted progressive taxation; some envisioned a social security program. Their real political ethos directly contradicts current right-wing efforts to cast passive government, unfettered markets, and wholesale tax resistance as the founding values of ordinary America.
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While in some ways the men of Carpenter’s Hall ["small farmers, artisans and laborers"..."lacking fancy educations and professions" and not members of the elite propertied class] might appear to be ancestors of Sarah Palin’s “real Americans”– they hunt, fish, build, farm; they keep and bear arms (and serve in militias); they’re political newcomers — Palin would brand them socialists. They’re here to create a radically new kind of government, one that restrains wealth, regulates business, and empowers labor. For the first meaningful time anywhere, their 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution will break the ancient connection between property and the political franchise, writing what we now call progressivism into law. Its legacy will survive in the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Great Society, and those programs’ reverberations in the very policies that today’s right condemns as categorically un-American. [bolding added]
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