Meeting At the Extremes

David Brooks in the NYT last week had an excellent piece about the Tea Partiers and the 60s New Left Movement which he called The Wal-Mart Hippies. Here are some of the points that hit me.

In the 60s there was the New Left. Today,

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.

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.

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. ...

But the core commonality is this: ... 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.

Because of this assumption, members of both movements

• go in big for conspiracy theories;
• they spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted.
• they both have a problem with authority.
• Both have a mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment.
• They don’t seek to form a counter-establishment because they don’t believe in establishments or in authority structures.
• They believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy.

After putting this all together he makes the point that the Tea Partiers are, in essence, not truly "conservative" for conservatives don't trust the people to do what is right. They believe in original sin. People are, by nature, prone to sin. So in that way the people-based idealism of the New Right is as idealistic and unrealistic as the New Left of the past generation.

As I read all this I found myself, as one of the old New Leftists, nodding in agreement. In explained to me why the whole Tea Party movement is so familiar looking. The biggest difference may be that this time around there is a media support that is pushing the process. Somehow or another that trust in the Glenn Becks of the media establishment may be its ultimate downfall.

Success will breed a slowing, conservative brake. The extreme will become more extreme- and potentially more dangerous. (See history for The Weathermen or others.) The co-opting will occur. And it will come from the people who agree with them, not the opponents.

Such is the world of politics. Perhaps even the world of people.