If you don't know her work, Jill Lepore is a terrific historian. I have used her delightful book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity a number of times in my introductory U.S. history survey. But right now Lepore is angry, and in her latest book she has leveled her aim at the Tea Party. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History tosses just about every accusation imaginable at the "far right" (apparently calling them "conservatives" or just the "right" would not suffice). Two aspersions stand out: the Tea Partiers are at least subliminally racist -- the "whites of their eyes" refers to their nostalgia for the all-white and all-male cast of the Founding Fathers. But most essentially, they are "fundamentalists" in their quasi-Christian reverence toward the Founding Fathers.
To be fair, there's a lot of interesting history interspersed with these gratuitous fulminations. But Lepore's rant against the Tea Party is at once predictable and ironic. Predictable because Lepore fulfills the stereotypical reaction that one would expect from a liberal (I do not say "far left") Harvard professor, who cannot fathom what could motivate these Tea Partiers other than racism and religious fanaticism. The Whites of Their Eyes is ironic because it perpetuates exactly the sort of angry political feuding that Lepore ostensibly deplores. Because of the book's tone, there's no chance that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party will read this book and be chastened by it. About the only thing this kind of book is guaranteed to do is to make left-wing readers feel good about themselves.
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