David Brooks: Post-Apocalypse, Tea Partiers Will Rule The Next Decade
“But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.”
– Five days into the new decade and David Brooks, in what sounds like some sort of preamble to Beyond the Thunderdome, is predicting that it will be known as the Tea Party Teens.
Sound scary? Brooks points out there is plenty of recent historical precedent to back this conclusion: “the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.” Which technically,yes, are all examples of ideas “associated with the educated class” gone sour. That said, I would love to see David Brooks to tell Gloria Steinem to her face that she was a precursor to the Tea Partiers.
12 comments
This is so absolutely frightening! Run for the hills, the Tea-Partiers are coming!
Never mind the fact that you’re taking a wide spectrum of people and simplistically lumping them all into a unified group. Hippies and feminists didn’t have degrees of pragmatic moderation and unwavering radicalism, right?
same2u says: Maybe the teabaggers should embrace education instead of mocking it, and then maybe math and science scores will improve compared to the rest of the world.
roxsteady says: This one forced me to spit coffee on my keyboard in laughter. Sure, the entire country would unite with a bunch of ignorant, uneducated doofs to vote for………..? The teabaggers have only themselves to blame for their marginalization. With the help of fox, they have over estimated the amout of people who are with them. Their racists and sometimes incoherent signs, see “No Youths In Asia” or the “Tell the Govt to keep it’s hands off my Medicare” are hysterical. We liberals are still laughing at them. I can’t wait for their stupid Tea Party Convention in February. The Dems will have plenty of negativity and stupidity to use in their campaign commercials.
m says: I don’t think this will happen. America is a great country, and having teabaggers destroy it (for a decade) is quite unlikely.
Pat Doherty says: Magister
Do you really think Brooks is a Kool-Aid drinker? He’s always struck me as a superficial, poll-driven pseudo-intellectual who believes eloquence equals insight. What he’s doing here is what he’s always done, putting his finger to the wind and trying to appear like he sees something the rest of us don’t.
(Sorry for getting incredibly self-referentially, but it seemed the best way to address the topic)
@Pat Doherty: The easy and possibly nonsensical joke was the reference to the Gawker post. In it, Belonsky tries to call Brooks out for his pseudo-intellectualism and if you scroll down to the comments, you’ll see that I pretty much call the columnist arrogant.
Though as to the substance of Brooks column, if you click through some of the links that have been filed under my blog’s Tea Party tag and if you mix-in those that didn’t get the tag or I didn’t get around to posting, the disorganized group is obviously going to be a force in the next election.
(Again, apologies for getting too self-referential, but this wasn’t really a “media” post anyway. And, if anyone takes offense at that one post title or the couple of instances where I tag beyond the evidence, Glynnis would probably appreciate you cursing at me over there, while bringing the discussion of David Brooks, his claims and the over-arching theme, back here.)
BTW: Unlike Brooks, I don’t belive the “Tea Party’ will exist much beyond 2010.
Think back to Perot, he was saying some similar things and made a big splash, but he didn’t do as well the next time around and by the time Pat Buchanan had appropriated his system, you could say that the “party” didn’t exist.
Pat Doherty says: Magister
I appreciate your rigorous explanation, and feel like a bit of a fool not having read the Gawker post (not really my cup of tea, though some of their stuff is pretty amusing). I think as you’ve observed (as well as most intelligent people who watch the national scene) the Tea Party movement will certainly be a force in 2010 (what the future holds I have no idea). Brooks, ever the zeitgeist-sniffer, is attempting to frame the resentments of the Tea Partiers as the informing pathos of the new decade. Someone really needs to let him know he’ll never be Tom Wolfe.
I’m not sure if you read the Gawker (and a quick scan of the post doesn’t reveal a link to the Brooks piece, it was addressing), but his jumping-off point was that he knows more about racism than the President from a town, where an effigy was hung last week.
IOW: He has a ways to go.
pyrope says: Yep, the teabaggers certainly would seem to qualify as the “great unwashed,” and perhaps they are not equipped to run this country, but ask yourself this: Just what have the enlightened liberals done for us? (Maybe that should be corrected to read “done TO us.”) Given what I’ve seen and what I know, I’d take the outcome wrought by the simple pragmatism of the working class any day over all I’ve seen from the so-called “progressives,” the socialists, communists, facists, and liberals any day.
justin_ca says: Jason over at Politicsinvivo.com has an interesting follow up to David Brooks’ article saying in part, “Brooks notes that trust in federal institutions, particularly Congress, are at “withering lows.” True enough. But why? Well, he asserts that many Americans are losing faith in the conviction that “pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems.” Wait, really? So we fickle Americans not only are questioning climate change and gun control, but the entire foundation of the social compact too? Is the basic governing ideology of the nation itself now just another egghead whim of the ‘educated class’?” http://www.politicsinvivo.com/2010/01/the-tea-party-decade-and-the-educated-class/
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