Clif Garboden: The Tea Party is the Woodstock Moment for Conservatives
[Clif Garboden is a Boston-area freelance writer.]
...What the Tea Party actually does represent seems to have a lot of observers baffled. Are its members just a bunch of kooks? Racists? Dittoheads? Survivalists? Libertarian extremists? Gun nuts? Thoughtful conservatives in wolves’ clothing? Can they really be all those things?
Yes they can. It’s a familiar pattern. I’ve seen it before, albeit from the opposite political pole. The Tea Party is an organization in no greater sense than “the Movement’’ was in the 1960s. Sure, between 1964 and ’74, millions of Americans - many young, most educated - coalesced around the shared goals of ending the Vietnam War and fulfilling the promise of the civil rights movement. But if people outside that New Left political flow thought we had a national plan or unified leadership, they were mistaken....
The Tea Party is no different, except, of course, its ties that bind are small government, lower taxes, and begrudging vital social services. Just as the ’60s New Left was plagued by all manner of progressive cohorts and lonely neurotics, the Tea Party is an magnetic bandwagon for conservative activist, ranging from pro-lifers to climate-change deniers to prayer-in-schools absolutists to people haven’t quite accepted heliocentrism, never mind evolution. Those factions, along with a giant cluster of conspicuously angry lone wingnuts, are climbing aboard and, in most media reports, overshadowing the group’s core of seemingly moderate sympathetic white, middle-class, suburban voters....
Disparate and disorganized as it was, the New Left of the 1960s accomplished a lot of long-term change and reform, so don’t be fooled by the Tea Party’s comical appearance or distracted by its frivolous fellow travelers. The loudmouths comprising the public face of the Tea Party by themselves didn’t catapult Scott Brown to the Senate, but they cheered him on. Whatever the Tea Party’s preaching, somebody’s listening to all the noise.
Read entire article at Boston Globe
...What the Tea Party actually does represent seems to have a lot of observers baffled. Are its members just a bunch of kooks? Racists? Dittoheads? Survivalists? Libertarian extremists? Gun nuts? Thoughtful conservatives in wolves’ clothing? Can they really be all those things?
Yes they can. It’s a familiar pattern. I’ve seen it before, albeit from the opposite political pole. The Tea Party is an organization in no greater sense than “the Movement’’ was in the 1960s. Sure, between 1964 and ’74, millions of Americans - many young, most educated - coalesced around the shared goals of ending the Vietnam War and fulfilling the promise of the civil rights movement. But if people outside that New Left political flow thought we had a national plan or unified leadership, they were mistaken....
The Tea Party is no different, except, of course, its ties that bind are small government, lower taxes, and begrudging vital social services. Just as the ’60s New Left was plagued by all manner of progressive cohorts and lonely neurotics, the Tea Party is an magnetic bandwagon for conservative activist, ranging from pro-lifers to climate-change deniers to prayer-in-schools absolutists to people haven’t quite accepted heliocentrism, never mind evolution. Those factions, along with a giant cluster of conspicuously angry lone wingnuts, are climbing aboard and, in most media reports, overshadowing the group’s core of seemingly moderate sympathetic white, middle-class, suburban voters....
Disparate and disorganized as it was, the New Left of the 1960s accomplished a lot of long-term change and reform, so don’t be fooled by the Tea Party’s comical appearance or distracted by its frivolous fellow travelers. The loudmouths comprising the public face of the Tea Party by themselves didn’t catapult Scott Brown to the Senate, but they cheered him on. Whatever the Tea Party’s preaching, somebody’s listening to all the noise.