The Tea Party Jacobins

by Mark Lilla
New York Review of Books

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop, with Robert G. Cushing
Houghton Mifflin, 370 pp., $25.00; $15.95 (paper)

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Agai
by David Frum
Doubleday, 213 pp., $24.95; $15.99 (paper)

Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government
by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe
Threshold, 325 pp., $29.99

Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism
by Marc J. Hetherington
Princeton University Press, 176 pp., $26.95 (paper)

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party
by Max Blumenthal
Nation Books, 394 pp., $25.00

"I am their leader, I had to follow them." — French radical Ledru-Rollin, 1848

A little over a decade ago I published an article in these pages titled “A Tale of Two Reactions” (May 14, 1998). It struck me then that American society was changing in ways conservative and liberal commentators just hadn’t noticed. Conservatives were too busy harping on the cultural revolution of the Sixties, liberals on the Reagan revolution’s “culture of greed,” and all they could agree on was that America was beyond repair.

The American public, meanwhile, was having no trouble accepting both revolutions and reconciling them in everyday life. This made sense, given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism. During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). As I wrote then, Americans saw “no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace…and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.

What happened? People who remember the article sometimes ask me this, and I understand why. George W. Bush, who ran on a platform of “compassionate conservatism,” seemed attuned to the recent social changes. The President Bush who emerged after September 11 took his party and the country back to the divisive politics of earlier decades, giving us seven years of ideological recrimination. By the time of the last presidential campaign, millions were transfixed not by the wisdom or folly of Barack Obama’s policy agenda, but by absurd rumors about his birth certificate and his “socialism.” Now he has been elected president by a healthy majority and is grappling with a wounded economy and two foreign wars he inherited—and what are we talking about? A makeshift Tea Party movement whose activists rage against “government” and “the media,” while the hotheads of talk radio and cable news declare that the conservative counterrevolution has begun.

(More here.)