The 60s -- the most important thing to not happen to David Brooks

I knew when I saw Brooks's by-line under this...

The Wal-Mart Hippies

...and in which he writes...

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

...that sooner or later Mr. D.H. Riley would have a riposte for the ages. I was not disappointed.

Okay, one: if there was some way to put Dick Armey, Dick Cheney, and Phil Gramm in a cage and determine who was the biggest lying shitbag, preferably involving the death of the other two, who would you bet on? How would anybody handicap that? Two: I keep hoping someone with the rights to the Alinsky estate will pull a Graceland™, and start suing every goddam wingnut who mentions him for copyright infringement. Seems like poetic justice.

But mostly this: that "extreme statements designed to shock". This is how the "moderate" Republican chooses to portray the ill- negatively-informed gun-tottin' chuckleheads who've overrun his party after they spent twenty years as sure votes and credulous consumers. They're performance artists, is what. It's like guerilla theatre, except in place of Left wing politics you have utter cluelessness, marching orders taken from disingenuous loons on th' teevee, and a belief that Barack Obama is the Kenyan Hitler. Seems like a reasonable comparison.

Reasonable indeed. One group was demonstrating against a war escalated by a Democratic president (one who'd passed major civil rights and Great Society legislation) -- a war in which they could be drafted for and eventually killed. The other against Keynsian counter-cyclical economic theories that they've never heard of or understand, and a new found demand for fiscal responsibility after complacently sitting in their self-made veal pens during eight years of budgetary time bombs of two wars they didn't mind and two tax cuts -- all of which were pretty much just for the hell of it. One in response to nightly scenes on the news of napalm, burning villages, and indiscriminant death. The other in response to the nightly breakdowns of Glenn Beck., in all his Lonesome Rhodes genius. And a president that doesn't look like them.

No, the tea partiers are not the flip side of "The Hippies" or "The New Left." They're the flip side of the "Good Ol' Party of Racists and Government oppression is ok as long as I'm not the one being 'oppressed,' aka, taxed or regulated." They're the Birchers. They're who establishment Republicans fear will draw back the curtain on the Party of Things that Must Not Be Said Except in the Privacy of the Country Club Locker Room. They're the reason the Republicans ever controlled all three branches of government for eight years -- they're the base and they have been for 40 years. Brooks, like Buckley before him, are embarrassed by these crazy relatives, but they're their relatives nonetheless.