Please Go to the Dead Trees Already

Ross Douthat:

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think.

Nobody's complaining that they don't have a plan; rather, the tea-baggers are deeply confused and don't have a point, except that they don't like Obama and have a moron-level grasp of economics. I mean, come on:

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

Their message is inchoate cultural resentment: and that is in point of fact the most charitable possible interpretation of their "movement," unless we're supposed to take seriously the idea that we should freeze spending in a recession. (and FWIW. contra Douthat, I have not yet seen a single tea-bag sign decrying subjunctive tax increases: they all believe their taxes have been already raised, despite the fact that they haven't.) More importantly, the rallies did not bring Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity out of the woodwork: they are the woodwork. They're the whole show. There's no "reasonable message" to hijack by extremists. The extremists own their own fucking TV news network!

And that's the major glaring difference between the teabaggers and the major anti-war protesters. ANSWER may have orgainzed those marches but you'd have to  be, well, a Fox news fan to believe ANSWER has a constituency that large. What made the ant-war protests so big was that there really was a large number of Americans who hated the idea of the war, on the merits, because the war was a stupid idea proposed by obvious fools, and at that time had absolutely no means of making that case in any other way. There was no room for that case to be made on television or in the newspapers, and most strikingly, Democratic leaders were by and large MIA.

In this sense the anti-war protests and the teabaggery ought to be seen as photo negatives: most of the anti-war people (if not necessarily the organizers) knew what they were talking about and actually did represent a much larger constituency, at least potentially: Obama reaped that popular windfall. The teabaggers don't understand their ostensible issue and are a demographic dead end.

So when Douthat says, basically, "don't laugh at the teabaggers, they might end up looking as smart as the anti-war protesters," that only makes sense if you can come up with a way to fudge the question of who is actually right about the issue. But whatever. I don't think the NYT op-ed section is getting any smarter anytime soon.