Year: 2010

by Smitty

David Brooks excreted another verbal puddle of nonsense into the NYeT yesterday.
He sets out to compare/contrast people who are alerted to the Constitutional threat with…hippies.

About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.

OK, David.

Today, another social movement has arisen. The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers also want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.

Actually, it’s a political movement. There is no attempt to broach any new language, attire, or societal structure. Also, the interest is in preserving the Constitutional establishment. There has been a threatening buildup of debt, usurpation of power, and deployment of spineless tools (see your nearest mirror, David) to support a Progressive overthrow of all that is good in the country. There is explicitly No Revolution, David. Only the slow erosion of separation of powers and Constitutional levels of government which you have overtly and covertly supported.

There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.

Thanks for the trite oversimplifications, David. The sad thing is that your straw man cage match might be viewed as accurate by someone. Or some two. Beyond that are the people who actually attend the Tea Parties, and know that the attendance runs the gamut of the economic spectrum.

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.

Wow, David. You behave as if:

• There was something new under the sun when the Left trotted out these radical tactics–Alinsky was substantially cribbing Sun Tzu.
• Mass rallies are somehow new or off limits because the Left “did them first”–no they didn’t.
• Extreme statements such as “The country is frickin’ broke!” are inaccurate. Facts are facts, and the simple truth that Progressive idiocy has bred an extreme situation cannot be avoided while calmly pursuing a remedy.

Thus, accusations of mimicry are stupid. Who gives a flying French fornication if there is any discernible overlap between methods? Attack the godforsaken problem! The “logic” of Brooksism would seem to be that Americans should just keep on pluckin’ that chicken until some completely new, historically unheralded method becomes available.
Will that be pixie dust, or a magic wand, Mr. Brooks?

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.

Yeah? So? And? Are you denying the value of “know thy enemy”?

But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

You are so completely wrong here, Brooks, as to bring a halt to all commentary. There is simply no joy in flogging erroneous ideas the way I crush the occasional millipede that creeps into the house. The Tea Party understands that people are fundamentally corrupt, David, and that there Is No Virtue In Bureaucracy. Can I beat that drum louder? Progressive Utopianism cannot purge the fundamental entropy in the human soul. No. What the Founders did, and you and your ilk seem bent on undoing, David, is delegate a finite set of powers to a central government to accomplish a limited set of objectives.
A century ago, we lost our way. We have the debt, the cratered political system, and the cratered roads to show for it.
The Tea Party is a restoration, not a revolution, you nitwit. The erroneous ideas you gleefully espouse are going to be systematically brushed aside. The painful realities of entitlement sunshine blown up generations of American fundament are going to be faced. The clear, simple wisdom of the Constitution, and the lessons of history will again be studied, so that snake oil salesman and kool aid merchants like yourself can be gently laughed at and ignored.
Or my name is not Phineas J. Whoopie.

Update: Ed Driscoll-lanche!