Let the Tea Partiers Sing

In observing the mainstream media’s treatment of the Tea Partiers I am reminded of two things: A) the mainstream media regularly pollutes public discourse in this country with false charges. I depict the phenomenon as Kultursmog in my new book, After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery; and B) the mainstream media really hates the American middle class.

Astoundingly, last week the Kultursmog had all media responding to charges that the Tea Party movement embraced violent racists. Boy Clinton even summoned up the evil image of Timothy McVeigh in remonstrating against the Tea Partiers. Actually the Tea Partiers represent a civic upheaval of good-natured people defending the salient American values of personal liberty, limited government, and the U.S. Constitution–to say nothing of their proper concern for the government’s looming debt.

As Michael Barone pointed out last week at a seminar we held on Hangover at the Heritage Foundation, in the late 1930s a revulsion against the New Deal’s lavish spending and many encroachments on American liberties rattled the New Dealers’ smug statism to the point that Barone could see FDR being defeated in his 1940 reelection bid had World War II not threatened. Obviously today’s Tea Party movement is not new. In fact, their concerns have been episodic for generations, and the smoke stacks of the Kultursmog always depict such protests as extremist. Today, of course, limited-government conservatives out number statist Liberals two to one–extremist indeed!

Further the so-called Liberals hate the middle class. A perfect example of this is the diabolizing of the pulchritudinous Sarah Palin. She is the embodiment of the American middle class–and, what is more, she is very cute.

Yet she and the Tea Partiers have been segregated from normal intellectual discourse. The Liberals who claim to be interested in intellectual give-and-take have no interest in intellectual give-and-take whatsoever. Wherever they can, they stifle give-and-take. The left and the right are completely segregated in American society by the left that does not want to hear from the other side. They are the New Segregationists. On campus, in the media, throughout the Kultursmog they patrol for intellectual purity. I would like to see a little give-and-take in their purlieus of supremacy. I guess you can call me an Intellectual Integrationist.