Posted on 06/30/2014 8:03:30 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Christopher Hitchens got a chance to analyze the Tea Party in 2011, the same year cancer took his life. In a Vanity Fair article titled "Tea'd Off," the great polemicist explains that populist movements like the Tea Party are a reaction to social and political change. Hitchens writes that before the Revolutionary War costumes, America had seen a somewhat similar phenomenon with the John Birch Society:
The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message--the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States--that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "dedicated, conscious agent" of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe...
... A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass "literature" has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots.
... Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
Would staunch conservatives in this day and age ever accuse Eisenhower of being Communist? Probably not, but the rhetoric from Tea Party politicians bemoaning everything from Obamacare to gay marriage indicates that America is moving more to the left than to the right. While William F. Buckley Jr. was prescient enough to know that the John Birch Society wasn't good for Republicans....
(Excerpt) Read more at huffingtonpost.com ...
What the HuffPo writer is trying to do is revive the epithet “reactionary”, which was applied through most of the 20th century to opponents of progressivism from the time of Theodore Roosevelt through the Johnson administration.
In other words, liberals feel that there is no intellectual basis to conservatism whatsoever, and that conservative opposition to the various liberal agendas is purely kneejerk and thoughtless.
Therefore, the Tea Party exists only for what it opposes, blah blah blah. The writer dredges up the John Birch Society to tar the Tea Party. Why stop there? Throw in the KKK while you’re at it.
Above all, delegitimize those who disagree with you. Then, if it’s like Germany in 1933, start rounding them up.
If you attended an Ivy League college and weren’t recruited by the intelligence agencies you were the exception.
The German volk of 1933 had already been mostly disarmed by the Weimar Republic and then the NDSAP. We have not.
But you and all of use need to understand, that is in reality how the libtards think! It makes total sense to these macaroons!
Buckey was the Karl Rove of his day. One of the elite GOP-e libertarians. Since sis demise, the National Review has become more of a liberal rag than before.
:)
H.A. Goodman is an A.ss H.at.
I’m not linking the people who call themselves part of the Tea Party movement with a group like the Birchers. I think it’s quite a bit different. I think the Birchers were a whole heck of a lot more organized. But that’s another story.
These people in the Tea Party movement do have a legitimate basis for their complaint. And the way I see it, it is a “reactionary movement” too. It definitely came about “in reaction” to this very great liberal trend across the board.
However, I’m not sure how effective this Tea Party movement will be, because it’s really no more than a certain segment of the population who opposes these liberal trends and they simply vote independently and act independently. It’s a “grass roots movement”. We may need more than a grass roots movement to offset this behemoth of liberalism moving across the country.
Definitely! LOL.. Good one.
I read the JBS material in my youth and it suggested that the rich elites were trying to make us communist.
I think the truth is they were trying to find a “middle ground” to maintain “peace” in the world by dealing with the communists.
They are trying to build a “New World Order” for the selfish interests of major interests (large business) with a mix of capitalist (Republican) and socialist (Democrat) rhetoric underlying it.
I hope issues like NSA spying and Common Core will help to create a broad based coalition of left and right to oppose the NWO.
HuffPo disimformation campaign ramps up.
themselves and the LIV types who believe anything they read and hear.
Alinsky's rules for radicals #5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Trouble is, for low-information types, all they hear is the ridicule and think no further.
Progressive elitists no more speak for america than does the tcpc speak for christiandom.
Together, I Shall Ride You To Victory
A Very Special Announcement
by T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/10/together-i-shall-ride-you-to-victory.html
That was great. I will henceforth forever call William Frank Buckley, Jr; T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII.
They don’t speak for you, but they are becoming more numerous ... :-) .
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