TenuredVulture wrote:drsmooth wrote:David Brooks in with his own variation of the "Tea Partiers are basically a hippies/New Left riff" riff
Brooks is big on cultural/political institutions. He seems incapable of imagining an Edward Abbey sort of radicalism, or conservatism (not that Abbey had a particularly lucid worldview, but where motives were concerned, he seemed disinclined to give individuals much more benefit of the doubt than he did institutions - possibly because he himself was so effed up).
In Brooks' eyes, conservatives by definition believe in in the fundamental good of institutions. So, he concludes a) the TPs and the hippies share a radical, and fundamental, anticonservatism and b) both "movements" are doomed to fail, implicitly because they are 'innocent' of the right, & might, of institutional forms.
Just to be clear, I don't agree with Brooks' conception of conservatives as necessarily being reflexive apologists for institutions.
I hate that I find my self in agreement with Brooks on these kinds of things so often. Maybe he's right. Probably somewhere there's a Brooks article where Neo-cons=Trotskyites.
And again, as I noted above, the new left and the tea partiers do share an enormous sense of entitlement, demand instant gratification, seem to reject any argument that is coherent, and neither seem especially attentive to personal hygiene.
By the way, the opposition of Rousseau to all that is decent and civilized is a true fact. Rousseau, and those inspired by him, are a true force of destruction and perhaps evil in the world. Hostility to Rousseau is far more pronounced on the traditional right than the left.
I readily acknowledge the stylistic/organizational/attitudinal similarities between Dirty Hippie Left and Teabagger Right, but the equivalencies can be taken too far. The origin story of the New Left, from Port Huron through the civil rights movement, was essentially affirmational: they called upon the country to live its professed values and think of itself as a community.
Certainly that idealistic spirit waned by the end of the '60s and some truly dark perversions of the original concept emerged--the Manson Family, the Weather Underground, the uglier actions of the Black Panthers. Less dramatic but (I'd argue) also harmful, as well as kind of ironic since the initial goal was full inclusion in a more pluralistic society, was the identity-politics trend on the left that manifested in strength through the '70s and '80s. Do those negatives outweigh the goods that the New Left helped bring--enormous gains in equity, environmental consciousness, even perhaps a partial move away from the ethnocentrism that characterized our foreign policy? I would say no, but of course YMMV.
This is all in pretty stark contrast to the Teabaggers, whose guiding ethos seems to be "fuck you, Jack: I got mine--and rightly so, since I deserve it and you don't." I don't want to reargue the extent to which race or class resentment plays into this, or how much of it is truly grass-roots and how much is stage-managed or at least backed by a chunk of the same Establishment Brooks thinks these folks are railing against, but I do think those are factors.
The self-righteousness of the Raging Right certainly mirrors that of the New Left, but I'd argue they skipped over the virtuous beginning and proceeded right toward the debased middle. We'll see if they reach the gruesome, tragic end of Manson and the bomb-throwers.
