Enough Glowing Comparisons, Glenn Beck’s Tea Party Is Heir to John Birch Society
OPS_admin | Mar 11, 2010 | Comments 0
The Tea Party that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate doesn’t merit comparison to positive social movements of the 1960s.
There is a fresh interpretive fad in the young field of Tea Party Studies: The New Right of 2010 as the New Left of the 1960s.
According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate is, in this view, more than just the latest herpetic outbreak of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid “pseudo-conservatism.” It is a reincarnation of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. The Tea Partiers, it is becoming fashionable to argue, are the heirs not just of the John Birch Society and the young Barry Goldwater, but also of Students for a Democratic Society and the young Abbie Hoffman.
If this analogy smells suspect, it’s for good reason. Yet it appears to be gaining traction, especially among a certain breed of moderate with confused understandings of Tea Party conservatism, the New Left, and ’60s counterculture. In late February, Michael Lind wrote a Salon piece in which he claimed, “The tea partiers are the hippies of our time…In Glenn Beck, the countercultural right has found its own Abbie Hoffman.”
Full Story: Enough Glowing Comparisons, Glenn Beck’s Tea Party Is Heir to John Birch Society | News & Politics | AlterNet.
Filed Under: Rightwing World



The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
moveon.org





