In a recent broadside against the Occupy movement, Alexander Cockburn assailed, among other things, “the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory. Where was the knowledge of, let alone the respect for, the past?”

Cockburn may be prone to rhetorical excess, but it is striking how little the Occupy movement has identified with any particular tradition of American radicalism. At the height 
of the southern Civil Rights Movement, it was common in New Left circles to refer to the 
Freedom Riders as “the new abolitionists,” the title of a much-read 1964 book by Howard 
Zinn. No such cries of historical continuity were audible from Zuccotti Park.

If there is one political movement that has claimed kinship with an American revolutionary tradition these past few years, it has been the Tea Party, with its tricorn hats and its fetish for the Founders. The American Revolution, or at least its orderly, legalistic reputation, is no doubt congenial to the Right and often held up as proof of Americans’ imperviousness to radical adventures. Whatever the historical facts, 1776 is remembered as a mere “political,” and not a social, revolt: the solemn replacement of an imperial constitution with a republican one.