Rod Dreher had a good post riffing on David Brooks column last week which is in turn well worth reading. Brooks argues, astutely in my view, that the Tea Party movement is in many ways the flipside of the 1960s New Left:
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.
Indeed. And since many American political trends end up crossing the Atlantic it’s probably not a great surprise that there are, or there want to be, British Tea Partiers too. Here’s Daniel Hannan explaining it all:
[T]he idea, in 1773, that Britain was a foreign country would have struck most Americans, patriot or loyalist, as ridiculous.
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