David Brooks, The New York Times op-ed columnist, is a friend of mine. Flying always at 40,000 feet above ground, he strives to observe the political landscape with a dispassionate conservatism. His best columns are spare and thoughtful, and offer reliable contrast to the gaudiness of Maureen Dowd, the glibness of Tom Friedman, the mediocrity of Bob Herbert, and the mawkishness of Nicholas Kristof. Yet last Tuesday, in a column titled “The Tea Party Teens,” David made irrefutably clear that he, too—like so many others in the mainstream metropolitan media—is a cultural supremacist.
The column was about the Tea Party movement, which has, in the space of a year, come to inhabit—and inhabit raucously—the landscape that Brooks parses from his lofty perch. In the piece, he sets up a dialectic between “the educated class” on the one hand, and, on the other, a force that he identifies variously as “public opinion,” the “opposition,” and “the Tea Party movement.” The latter, a “fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” are, David writes, reflexively opposed to the beliefs of the educated class (to which he, naturally, belongs). They are, in effect, reactionaries.
The Tea Partiers, it is said, are crude, sloganeering, lemming-like, heartland Bible-Beltists who don’t understand policy or David Brooks’ subtleties.
Put to one side, for the moment, David’s exaggeratedly Hamiltonian belief in the natural leadership abilities of people like him, and ask this: What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated? Forgive me, here, for bringing to the discussion a personal note. I have a cousin who is a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan. She is a Tea Party supporter, and she wrote me these words in an email:
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Whatever odious messages and and hidden agendas may lurk within these tea parties, they are a legitimate form of public protest. Any member of the elite political class that ignores a sufficiently large citizen protest is risking their political future.
In a democracy, numbers count. It doesn’t matter how “smart” or “realistic” the ideas are – if enough people support them, they will eventually become the lay of the land.
Cy – good point so we should watch the anti-proroguing group here in Canada?
UV:
That doesn’t seem like a real movement, IMO. Looking at the facebook group, many of the active participants are politically connected to one of the other major parties. My experience is that most of the population does not know what proroguing is and couldn’t care less about the latest manufactured outrage. Taxation is much easier to understand and most of us are forced to consider its effect every second Friday. Harper would be better off putting the correct spin on the HST than justifying proroguing the government during the olympics.
Well said Cy! The Harper Sales Tax, similar to Mulroney’s GST will long be negatively remembered by many Canadians unless Harper can put some kind of positive spin on it. But, hes probably going to leave that to the Premiers of both Ontario & BC. A big mistake if he does.
But hey all you people from Ont.- we don’t have a ‘ Harper HST’ tax in the Yukon! How can that be – the Yukon is as Liberal red as anywhere in Ontario. Could it be that you have a ‘ Mcsquinty HST’? Park the blame on the correct doorstep or risk being seen as a fool by the rest of us.