A few days ago, Cass Sunstein wrote an article about how Alger Hiss explained the Tea Party. It was a foolish article, and now, Walter Russell Mead responds to it in an essential rebuttal, “Is the Tea Party Really All About Alger Hiss?”
Calling the Tea Party “a huge intellectual problem for blue model liberals,” he first shows how despite all the obituaries, “it remains a significant force,” unlike its opposite, the short lived left-wing Occupy movement. The reasons for the Tea Party’s success, he writes, is not because there is a “right-leaning populist surge today because of Alger Hiss.” Rather, it is because “many Americans believe that President Obama’s liberal and technocratic agenda represents a threat to a way of life they value,” and because they blame “the establishment of both parties for the financial crisis and for the vast transfer of resources to the wealthy that came after the crash.”
As for how liberals view the world, Mead writes, “After decades of vicious invective and bile-spewing, liberals find the whole His subject dull and don’t want to think about the case anymore- but they just hate it when other people don’t appreciate their selfless dedication to the public good.” During the so-called Joe McCarthy era, he adds, “anti-Communist hysteria (as opposed to necessary anti-Communist vigilance) must be laid at the door of the vain and feckless liberals who let the country down in a critical time.”
Mead has helped us to see how they are still at their old tricks.
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