David Brooks is getting plenty of heat, and rightly so, for comparing the Tea Party movement to the New Left of the 1960s. On the other hand, the Tea Partiers should hope they advance as far. If that were to happen, within four decades, they’d be:
- In the White House.
- Running Congress.
- Running Hollywood.
- Running the news media.
- Running the university system.
- Running numerous state governments and their affiliated services.
And American beer would taste a lot better, too, as Glenn Reynolds jokes in the Washington Examiner, using the analogy of an increasingly watered-down Schlitz beer in the 1970s as a metaphor for a government that, pace Miller Lite, tastes awful and is unbelievably filling:
A nation whose government does not rest on the consent of the governed is a nation whose government holds sway only by inertia, or by force.It is a nation vulnerable to political shocks, usurpation, or perhaps even political collapse or civil war. It is a body politic suffering from a serious illness. Those who care about America should be very worried.
AdvertisementBut we’ve had enough political drama in recent years, so I’ll go for a more prosaic comparison: The once-heady brew of American freedom has become watery and unsatisfying.
In fact, when I think of the federal government’s brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and “accelerated” brewing for its traditional approach.
Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. Sales collapsed, and a “Taste My Schlitz” campaign designed to lure beer drinkers back failed when the “improved” brew turned out not to be any better. A brand image that had been accumulated over decades was lost in a few years, and it has never recovered.
The federal government, alas, finds itself in much the same position. The political class sold its legitimacy off in drips and drabs. As “smart politics” has come over the past decades to mean not persuasion but the practice of legerdemain, the use of political deals, cover from a friendly press apparat and taking advantage of voters’ rational ignorance, the governing classes have managed to achieve things that would surely have failed had the people known what was going on.
But though each little trick may have slipped by the voters, the voters have nonetheless noticed that the ultimate product isn’t what it used to be. The end result, as with Schlitz, is a tarnished brand. And rescuing tarnished brands is hard.
It gets worse. Not long ago, the federal government enjoyed a stellar reputation for honesty and competence. Now, according to a recent CNN poll, three-quarters of Americans think federal officials aren’t honest . (There’s no separate survey here on what the “political class” thinks, but I suspect that its numbers would be sunnier, but still appalling, as above). So what do we do with a federal government that many voters think is illegitimate and dishonest?
On the other hand, when you’re a media that’s so in bed with the Washington power structure that Rush Limbaugh has only half-jokingly dubbed them “the state-run media”, you really don’t want change of any sort, other than the Orwellian “change” that Obama proffered, which was a Barack to the Future return to FDR/LBJ/John Kenneth Galbraith-style command and control corporatism.
In the late 1960s, when the New Left was just getting started, Tom Wolfe was winding up his days as a working reporter with the New York Herald-Tribune. He watched television news crews work out carefully choreographed routines with protesters to ensure great video on the 6:00 PM evening news. And ever since, the media — long before the Internet and their own dissipation transformed into the legacy media — never saw a protest they didn’t like.
Until now. And ironically, Brooks may have stumbled over the reason why, in spite of himself.
There was also the factor of the liberal media of the 1960s vicariously acting out their hopes and dreams through the protesters, who could say and do the things many wanted to voice in their news reports, but couldn’t because the standards of mixing news and opinion were higher then than they are today. They couldn’t say those things, but they could give those who were saying it significant air time or space in the daily news hole — the only problem being liberal journalists of the day truly believed they were riding the wave of the near future, which is why the 1972 election so bamboozled them, as did Reagan’s victory post-Watergate, after they thought the wind was again at their backs.
With the same circumstances present today, but to even a greater extent (Carter during his presidency was never really considered one of them the way Obama is), you’re seeing the same sort of anger a previous generation of journalists had, but without the controls against mixing news and opinion of 40-plus years ago, added on to the fact that the people they support are now the ones in power. So today, the protesters are the enemies but the anger remains, and as a result, instead of the big media being angered and outraged by the Chicago-style tactics of Richard J. Daley 42 years ago, they basically want the White House, union enforcers and Congressional Democrats to use the law and intimidation in a Chicago-style way against the Tea Party movement and others who try to block their goals (Tom Friedman’s series of columns wistfully imagining a U.S. government with the same type of power over its dissidents as China has is the most overt expression of what many in the big media today would like to see done under the right conditions).
Thank you for the linkage, sir.
Whodathunk the tagline “Taste My Schlitz” would be a crashing failure.
The PJTV video is archived and not available without a subscription
Rich,
Try it now. At worst, you may need to register to view the video (it’s the Professor interviewing Breitbart at CPAC on the media’s disdain for the Tea Parties versus just about every protest that’s come before), but I believe that it should be free.
Ed
Prof. Reynolds touches on one founding principle among many that are proclaimed in the Declaration. Much of our current problems and debate have to do with the assertion of self-evident Truths and unalienable rights. The Progressive movement’s foundation is relativism (political, cultural, moral), which denies that there is such a thing as Truth or rights that precede the formation of government. It’s good to see people like Reynolds fighting back, but we have more than a century of catching-up to do,
“Tom Friedman’s series of columns wistfully imagining a U.S. government with the same type of power over its dissidents as China has is the most overt expression of what many in the big media today would like to see done under the right conditions”
I still don’t get why Friedman’s open love for tyranny is tolerated. Are the editors and readers of the NYT that blind? Are they in agreement with him? How can someone who so openly wishes for the replacement of the American Republic with a totalitarian dictatorship be accepted in what passes for polite society?
Rich,
Just par for the course at the Gray Lady.
Ed
Ed,
A major difference between the tactics of the Tea Party folk and the so-called new Left is that the new Left made a deliberate and systematic effort to dominate the universities, with the goal of churning out graduates who were indoctrinated in leftist ideas. In such efforts they were provided moral and monetary support by the KGB in the 70s and 80s.
Long-term efforts to combat the leftists must include attacking the universities.
Brooks, as usual, is wrong. I was a protester in the 60s/70s. We were arrogant and cock-sure. As a Tea Partier now, we’re all just worried, worried that our headlong pursuit of selfishness is going to leave our kids and grandkids a mess that will override much of their pursuit of happiness.
Brooks is a very useful instrument for getting insight into the coastal elite, yuppie nomenclature. In a way, he is honest. He doesn’t tell me anything about the world around me, but more of the decaying, old world around him.
I am dying to ask him why the New York Times picked him as the court conservative? I mean, we know, I’m just curious as to what his notions are.
The Tea Party and Conservatives must espouse a creative way to always go on the attack. If they don’t, they will fall back onto the wayside. This is a systemic problem: political dynamics are rigged against them from the outset, because the basic idea of Conservativism is to NOT always be changing the status quo as per progressivism.
Thus Conservatives are always playing defense, which is never the way to win. To paraphrase the IRA as applied to progressives: “…remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
The Times,through the years, has yet to find a dictatorship it did not like. Hitler,
Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, Noriega…
Paul – first paragraph very well put. Thanks.
There are a lot of ways of saying it: “Progressives” are tribalists, they really do want a Big Man to relive them of the responsibility of thinking for themselves; the lot of them are narcissistic, and one common trait of narcissists is authoritarianism; Their statist religion is as intolerant of The Other as Islam.
Yes, Friedman’s natural readership loves tyranny, as long they can imagine themselves as part of the privileged class. It doesn’t matter where they were born, they are European statists in worldview, and have no love for Liberty.
Tea Partiers Hope That Left Is Right
I don’t think so.
I will go with Mark twain on this one:
“Thunder is good, Thunder is impressive,
but it is Lightning that does the work.”
The Tea Partiers need to electrify the
nation, not generate sound and fury.
W/R/T #12 – Charlie: Nobody from the boomer generation gives a flying f**k about the younger people they’ve saddled with (and continue to saddle) debt for their own selfish fantasies. Which are now played out en masse between the Presidency and the Speaker Granny Rictus McBotoxImplants (h/t, Doug Ross!).
Thatcher was right: “They [Socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”
Hey Rob Crawford: If you want to get a feel for how scummy the Times has been in the past, click on Ed’s link and then click on the Walter Duranty link. It’ll make your skin crawl. Friedman’s present lunacy is just par for the course with these clowns.
Whatever happened to those 1970s-era bumper stickers that read “De-Fund the Left”? They faded away after Reagan got elected but their message has never yet gone out of date.