On the night before we are scheduled to address this conference, the Tea Party experts are treated to a meal at the Faculty Club. It sounds fancy, and it is, with the feel and décor of a Sundance ski lodge. Over craft beers, wine, and cheese, we discuss that favorite topic of liberal academics: What the hell happened to Barack Obama? Why does the right have all the energy that he and the left used to own?
But the focus is going to be on the academics and the activists, on and off the stage. They want to know what the hell is going on. They are in Berkeley, where they are used to venerating left-wing activism and putting up sandbags against the once-a-decade conservative wave--Reagan (twice), Proposition 13 (about property taxes), Proposition 209 (about affirmative action), George W. Bush. The Tea Party, though? A bunch of people who reverse-engineer Saul Alinsky and yell "Keep the government out of Medicare" and have conservatives shouting down politicians and filling street corners?
| The rest of the piece demonstrates how resolutely the left insists on thinking within the box. These people aren't progressive, they're staunchly reactionary, standing four-square against the flow of history. They're using axes and bow saws and a schematic of a Franklin stove to understand the nuclear power plant in front of them, poor dears. |
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