An Interesting post by Jonah Goldberg in National Review blog

Brooks And The Tea Parties

Several readers have asked my opinion of David Brooks' latest column, in part because for the first time since publication, he mentions my book. I'm glad to see it there, but I don't think that's the part worth discussing.

I've long argued that the key to understanding David Brooks is that he hates the culture war. I've heard him say on panels more than once that he finds it exhausting, counter-productive and clichéd. Obviously, he's got good reason for his weariness. The culture war is exhausting. The problem is that his frustration with the culture war produces certain tendencies in his analysis. He will frequently condemn both sides equally. Or he will apportion blame between both sides equally. Or he will conclude that both sides are really mirror images of each other. Or, as he did to a certain degree in BoBos in Paradise, he will jump to the conclusion that the culture war is over because he wants it to be. In yesterday's column, he opts for the "mirror image" argument:

David argues that the Tea Parties are like the New Left of the 1960s. It's an interesting comparison. Here's part of it.

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, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.

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 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.

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” 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.

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 by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

Again, it's interesting. But when he says the "similarities are more striking than the differences," I think he gets it backwards. The differences are more striking than the similarities.

He then goes on to discuss the people who buy his books and conservative books, what all the buy in addition, and why they are doing so.
Read it all, I think you will enjoy it and agree with most of it.