I don’t think I would have fared so well in colonial NC if this was the norm…

Principle, pragmatism and the American Revolution : The New Yorker: “Tea abstention and consumer sacrifice, Breen writes, ‘created a climate that encouraged other people to adopt more coercive ways to preserve liberty’—a phrase of Orwellian depths. Since the local committees lacked legal authority, their chief tools were intimidation and ostracism. As for violence, the committees forswore it ‘except so much as is necessary,’ as a Worcester group nicely explained. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a committee went door to door for signatures to a new loyalty oath. According to its own minutes, the committee gave holdouts six days to reconsider before it published their names and ordered fellow-citizens to shun and boycott them—a stern but legal measure. “

Hopefully the co-opted Tea Party of 2010/11/12 won’t seek such coercive measures but I haven’t seen much to convince me otherwise.

We live in dangerous times.