Op-Ed Columnist - The Wal-Mart Hippies - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/opinion/05brooks.html?pagewanted...

March 5, 2010

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Wal-Mart Hippies

By DAVID BROOKS

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.

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. This mimicry is no accident. 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.” Those last two books
were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading
polemicist on the right.

But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass
innocence. 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. “Man is born free, but he is
everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

Because of this assumption, members of both movements go in big for conspiracy theories. The ’60s left
developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy
corporatist/imperialist networks — theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky. In its short life, the
Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the
big banks and corporations and black helicopters.

Because of this assumption, members of the Tea Party right, like the members of the New Left, spend a lot

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Op-Ed Columnist - The Wal-Mart Hippies - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/opinion/05brooks.html?pagewanted...

of time worrying about being co-opted. They worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are
perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks.

Because of this assumption, members of both movements have a problem with authority. Both have a
mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment. Like the New Left, the
Tea Party movement has no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal
liberation, when the federal leviathan is brought low.

Recently a piece in Salon astutely compared Glenn Beck to Abbie Hoffman. In it, Michael Lind pointed out
that the conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s built a counter-establishment — a network of think tanks,
activist groups, academic associations and political leaders who would form conservative cadres, promoting
conservative ideas and policies.

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. They believe in mass action and the politics of barricades, not in structure and
organization. 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.”

For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative.
Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty.
To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent
institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure
individual longings.

That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The
New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But
they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will
not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the
left, now the right.

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