{"id":402291,"date":"2010-03-05T10:39:40","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T15:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.disinfo.com\/?p=24081"},"modified":"2010-03-05T10:39:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T15:39:40","slug":"the-wal-mart-hippies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/402291","title":{"rendered":"The Wal-Mart Hippies"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks disses tea partiers, the \u2018New Left\u2019 and conspiracy<\/a> theorists<\/a> in the New York Times<\/a> (where else?):<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky\u2019s book \u201cRules for Radicals\u201d on Amazon.com are, according to the company\u2019s software, also buying books like \u201cLiberal Fascism,\u201d \u201cRules for Conservative Radicals,\u201d \u201cUnholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,\u201d and \u201cThe Shadow Party: How George Soros<\/a>, Hillary Clinton<\/a>, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. \u201cMan is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,\u201d is how Rousseau put it.<\/p>\n

Because of this assumption, members of both movements go in big for conspiracy<\/a> theories\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[continues in the New York Times<\/a>]<\/p>\n

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