Tea Party vs. 1960s Radicals

David Brooks is the very embodiment of a New York Times editor’s picture of a “responsible” conservative.

He supported Obama in 2008 and dismisses Sarah Palin as an ignoramus without table manners. He considers Glenn Beck a clown and disdains the traditional conservative desire for limited government, lower taxes and fiscal responsibilities.  Perhaps most outrageously, however, Brooks last week managed to equate the tea party movement with the Weather Underground, SDS and the radicals who crawled out of leftist fever swamps in the sixties dedicated to destroying the America the tea partiers profess to love.

After the GOP electoral losses in 2006 and 2008, Brooks dismissed the notion that Republicans lost mainly because they had performed poorly in office and instead warned that the basic values of conservatives had destroyed the Republican brand. In BrooksWorld, Republicans lost because conservatives just hadn’t come to grips with modernity. Goldwater and Reagan, he hinted, spoke for a different time, to a different electorate in a different voice. The country and politics had changed and the time had come for conservatives to grow up.

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