No, Greg Abbott's Texas "Standoff" Is Nothing Like the Whiskey Rebellion
Intellectually dishonest the rebels were not.
In reaction to the Supreme Court’s upholding the Biden administration’s power to remove razor wire installed by Texas along parts of the U.S. border with Mexico, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has adopted a play-to-the-base posture of defying federal authority and—joined oratorically by other rightist state governors—threatening a constitutional-crisis-level confrontation between state and federal power. Social-media-politics discourse over the issue heated up in the past few days, and I saw a lot of comparisons between that developing standoff and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. That’s when people in five western counties of Pennsylvania, joined by those in western counties of Virginia and Maryland, and in common cause with some in Kentucky, defied federal authority, which President Washington then led about 12,000 federalized miltia troops westward to assert.
Some of these invocations of the Whiskey Rebellion are made by right-wingers who foolishly glorify and inaccurately identify with the founding-era uprising—despite the fact that it was totally unsuccessful and had anything but right-wing aims—and cast themselves as latter-day resisters of federal tyranny supposedly prevailing today. But many of the invocations I see are made by Biden supporters envisioning a military assertion of federal force in the glorious founding spirit of great Washington.
On both sides, the history of the period gets extraordinarily garbled, but this post isn’t both-siderism. I expect the right to get this stuff wrong. What I tend to focus on, here at BAD HISTORY, are the bizarre pseudo-histories put out by people more like me.
That’s what I think matters. That’s where I like to dimly imagine some progress toward clarity might be made—and imagine, even more dimly, that such progress might help with bigger issues.
Here are a few of the relevant tweets: