Many voters and commentators talk about the Tea Party and Glenn Beck as if they were a brand new phenomenon in American politics, and see the rise of the Tea Party as a reaction to the election of our first Black president.
But, as an excellent article in this week's New Yorker details, the Tea Party is a continuation of the radical fringe that has haunted the Republican party since the era of Joseph McCarthy. What is new is that there are no longer enough moderate conservatives to keep this lunatic fringe under control.
The New Yorker article was written by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, and can be found on line at http://www.newyorker.com/...
I urge other Kossacks who are interested in the historical roots of the Tea Party movement to read Sean Wilentz' article. It is well written as well as informative.
I'm old enough to remember the heyday of the John Birch Society, but I didn't know how much of Beck's peculiar ideas on US history and the Founding Fathers has been shaped by the writings of the Right Wing lunatic fringe of the 1950s and 60s. In fact, Beck's list of Must-Red books for his followers includes books written by Willard Cleon Skousen,who in 1962 was kicked out of the ultraconservative American Security Council, because members felt that he had "gone off the deep end."
Besides providing an intellectual history of the extreme right wing, Wilentz' article gives a really good summary of how the Republicans' approach to these groups has changed as the Republican Party has changed.
The article helped me get a much better understanding of the Tea Party, than the gazillion TV reports I've seen. And I have to agree with Wilentz when, at the end of the article he says:
For the moment,...it appears that the extreme right wing is on the verge of securing a degree of power over Congress and the Republican Party that is unprecedented in modern American history. For defenders of national cohesion and tempered adversity in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs.