The New Hippies?

Spectacular delusion from David Brooks at the New York Times:

"About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.

Today, another social movement has arisen. 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."

That is one of the biggest loads of nonsense I have ever heard. Back in the sixties, people were trying to stop our country from pursuing a war of aggression in which our military killed more than two million civilians. Today, the teabaggers are trying to make the government cut their taxes, because they are too damned greedy to pay their share to keep this country solvent. If you think there is any equivalent between those two things, moral or otherwise, you are crazy.

"Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left. These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.”

I find this so funny. Right wing blogs are constantly talking today about this guy Alinsky, who is virtually forgotten today, and who was never a really important figure during the anti-Vietnam days- trust me, I was there. The hard core were reading Lenin, and the rest were too stoned to focus their eyes on anything more complicated than the cover of We're Only In It For the Money. No wonder the people buying his book are conservatives- he is just one more right wing straw man. And of course the real irony of this is that the only person who seems to be praising "his methods" is one of the main forces behind the tea party movement.

"But the Tea Partiers are closer to the New Left. 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...As one activist put it recently on a Tea Party blog: “We reject the idea that the Tea Party Movement is ‘led’ by anyone other than the millions of average citizens who make it up.”

Give it up David. I said it before, and I'll say it again: the only thing teabaggers don't believe in is paying their taxes. They are suckers being manipulated by Republican insiders, promoted by the national media and the party apparatus. And that's nothing you could ever say about the protesters of the 60's.

Comments

Infidel753 said…
For hippies, the teabaggers seem to fall kind of short in the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-&-roll department too.....
rockync said…
From the era of "hippies" came the Freedom of Information Act, the civil rights acts of 1964 & 1968 and new search and seizure/probable cause rulings and Miranda - all of which the tea baggers seem to want to curtail or rescind.
The new Hippies? HA! We old hippies are still here so the tea baggers can f**k off!
Green Eagle said…
I was there too, and I have been to a bunch of tea parties. Anyone who thinks the ludicrous, pathetic teabaggers even compares to what happened in the sixties is nuts.

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