Jim Hoft says it’s a “smear” for the New York Times to compare the Tea Party movement to the Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s. More to the point, the comparison is stupidly inaccurate.
The Weathermen emerged after 1969 from Students for a Democratic Society — an organization, as it name says, composed primarily of college students. SDS was founded at Port Huron, Mich., in 1962 from the remnant of a predecessor, Student League for Industrial Democracy. While they had a full agenda of left-wing politics, SDS grew from a relatively small group to a mass organization during the 1960s based on its leading role in organizing protests against the Vietnam War.
As the war escalated, SDS leaders grew increasingly alienated from “the System” and in 1968, led protests at the Democratic National Convention that turned into a riot. This was followed by the 1969 “Days of Rage” — a spree of vandalism in Chicago — after which Bill Ayers and other Marxist radicals in SDS, contemptuous of mere protest, formed the Weather Underground as a sort of American Vietcong, intending to lead a guerrilla revolution.
That thumbnail history alone should suffice to differentiate the two movements, but for the sake of clarity let’s consider the significant fact that the Tea Party is not a student movement. At its peak, SDS counted among its membership tens of thousands of college students who brought to the organization all the impracticality, impetuousness and impertinence that we might expect from disgruntled teens and 20-somethings.
The fact that the Tea Party movement is composed primarily of middle-aged, middle-class adults — people with homes, jobs, families and the other responsibilities of adulthood — is highly significant. These are not starry-eyed idealists who dream of changing the world, but citizens inspired to activism aimed directly at influencing the political process.
SDS and its allies in the campus Left fomented lawlessness by encouraging draft evasion. SDS engaged in a series of headline-making stunts in which students took over administration buildings at elite university campuses — including Columbia and Cornell — and issued demands to the administration. SDS was also instrumental in organizing a series of demonstrations (most memorably at Yale) on behalf of Black Panthers accused of criminal violence.
By contrast, leaders of the Tea Party movement have never encouraged or condoned any criminal behavior. They have organized no sit-in protests nor other acts of “civil disobedience.” To suggest that Tea Party activists are fundamentally like SDS and the anti-war movement of the 1960s simply because both engage in public protest rallies is to say that Barry Manilow and Metallica are fundamentally alike because both engage in concert tours.
The main thing illustrated by this New York Times article is the editorial mindset at 620 Eighth Avenue. Guarantee you what happened is that an editor got this cute idea for a feature story and assigned it to a staff writer who dutifully rounded up “expert” sources — professors at Northwestern, Bryn Mawr and Pitt — who obliged by offering their responses to the reporter’s question: “Hey, uh, these Tea Party people — they’re kind of scary and dangerous, right?”
UPDATE: Ann Althouse:
Remember, the NYT readers are aging liberals. They — we — remember the 60s as glory days.
For our TMI files, Professor Althouse adds this:
I have had lovers quarrels with Communists.
Yeah? Well, in 1983 and ’84 I dated a Cranston delegate named Donna — with a capital “D,” IYWKWIMAITYD — and it’s probably best if we all left our “glory days” in the past, where they belong, as reminders of our youthful folly.
Did I say “folly”? I dated Donna while two-timing my regular girlfriend, an Auburn fan who was 4-foot-10 but still the meanest girl I ever knew. She damn near clawed my eyes out . . .
