Mugwumps And Other Parties That Go Bump In The Night

Once upon a time, third parties gave their associations some truly entertaining and descriptive names. As with the Tea Party, such names had nothing to do with the efforts associated with the mayfly groups.

In New York, the names of the parties have been quite entertaining up until recently when more pedestrian monickers have taken over, such as Liberal, Conservative, Working Families, and Right To Life. Zzzzzz.

Back in the day, as they say, party names such as Locofoco were the vogue. Locofoco? The Locofocos were a radical workingman's party in New York City in the 1830s whose slogan was "Bread, Meat, Rent, And Fuel! Their prices must come down!" Their actual name was the Equal Rights Party, and they attempted a kind of sit-in at the Democrats' Tammany Hall, upon which the main-streamer Democrats turned off the gas lights to clear the building. In turn, the radicals lit the newly-invented safety matches whose brand name was - Loco Foco. The Whig press in the city slapped the Locofoco label on them, which the splinter group eventually embraced.

The Soft Shells-Hard Shells - yes, as in crabs - denoted a rapprochement between two separate branches of the Democratic Party in New York. The Soft Shells were pro-slavery nationally in the 1850s and the Hard Shells anti. (New York State had abolished slavery in 1825.) Fernando wood won the city mayoralty in 1854 under the Soft Shell-Hard Shell banner, uniting the factions over local issues.

Wood, who had come to loggerheads with Tammany, won again in 1859, this time running on the Mozart Hall ticket, Mozart Hall being the rival clubhouse within the Democratic Party positioned against Tammany.

From the Civil War onward for about 60 years or so, the party name game slowed down. The Fusion Party, a nice musical, we-are-the-world party popped up, sure.

But nothing much happened until Fiorello LaGuardia, a hybrid Italian-Jewish Congessman, ran for re-election in 1937 on the City Fusion-Progressive-American Labor-Republican ticket. He ran against Jeremiah Mahoney who ran on the Democrat-Trades Union-Anti-Communist ticket.

In 1945, Newbold Morris, descended from the famous colonial Morrises and husband to the daughter of Judge Learned Hand, ran on the No Deal Party ticket and garnered almost one-quarter of the vote. And in 1950, Vincent Impelliteri won the mayor's office running for the Experience Party.

In 1961, Louis Lefkowitz lost while running on, among other party lines, the Non-Partisan ticket.

Perhaps the most entertaining and famous third party with New York roots is Teddy Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" party, really the Progressive Party. Sad to say, though, the over-the-top name was taken from T.R.'s running mate in 1912, California governor, Hiram Johnson who said, "I'm as strong as a bull moose!"

I have a letter in to the Tea Party leaders suggesting that, in New York State anyway, they strongly consider changing their name to the Crackpot Party. Truth in advertising, my friends. Truth in advertising.

The Contract On America 2.0 - The Radical Right's Plan For Completing The Destruction Of America

Leave it to the morally and intellectually bankrupt Republicans to come up with a plan that proposes our country take a number of giant leaps backward. Meanwhile, they assert with a straight face that these proposals show they are not The Party of No. Interesting concept... NOT The Party of NO.

It reminds me of a lyric from the 1956 Broadway show, L'il Abner, whose song Jubilation T. Cornpone, mockingly portrayed a cowardly, incompetent Confederate General:

When we fought the Yankees and annihilation was near,

Who was there to lead the charge that took us safe to the rear?

Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone...

The first thing that these inhumane monsters on the right want to do is say NO to, to repeal, or at least hamstring health care reform enough so it limps along accomplishing nothing. So, people with pre-existing conditions, poorer children, marginal wage-earners, the almost-old and a host of others will find themselves tossed off the gurney and into the unknown. 


The second thing the radicals want to do is to say NO to spending the rest of the stimulus package. This at the very time when the funds yet to be spent will be pumped into infrastructure, education, and towards mitigating the housing crisis. 


The radicals are also saying NO to Social Security and Medicare at a time when millions and millions of Baby Boomers are reaching age 65. In the jolly spirit of their Know-Nothingism, though, Republicans have not made clear the specifics of how cuts would be carried out. 


They also are saying NO to federal funding of abortions. NO to non-traditional marriage. NO to the rescission of the odious "Don't ask don't tell" policy in our armed forces. NO to a pathway to citizenship for aliens who serve in the armed forces. NO to a tax rise for the rich who are the only group to have achieved any personal economic growth in the last 15 years. NO to any legislation that the radicals believe is "unconstitutional," meaning anything they disagree with. NO to any sort of deficit spending, one of the pillars of modern state-interventionist economics. 


What is absent from the New And Unimproved Contract On America? 

• Any mention of education funding whether for Head Start, English-As-A-Second-Language Programs, Anti-Drop-Out funding, or higher education funding. In other words, NO.
• A mention, even in passing, of a coherent energy policy. Not even one that is pro-oil, which we might understandably expect. So, NO again.
• Some sort of viewpoint on the continuing degradation of the environment? NO.
• Proposals on how to deal with our increasingly at-risk food supply? NO.
• Thoughts on how to deal with the continuing off-shoring of American jobs? NO.
• Cutting out-of-control defense spending? NO.

The impulse to blame government for every ill in society is a strong one, and it occurs in equal measure on the left and right. 

The chief difference is that the left generally believes in the perfectability of government, really an optimistic position that is about our own personal perfectability, and one that reflects the positive or "YES" nature of leftist politics through the centuries. 

The right simply wants to burn the social contract and scatter its ashes, believing deep down that government per se is evil, that the individual is all that matters, that the accumulation of personal wealth at the expense of the commonweal is the preferable condition of society. In spasms of atavism, they wish to return to an existence in the "state of nature" that Hobbes so famously described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Let's see how they're doing.

Solitary - play each of us off against the other politically. Fear thy neighbor, especially if he or she has a different-color skin or religion. Check.

Poor - the decline of the middle and lower middle class over the last 30 years. Destroy unions, import cheap illegal labor, ship well-paying jobs overseas, allow under-priced imports into country. Check.

Nasty - prevent people of the same sex from choosing their marriage partners. Check.

Brutish - shouting down opponents at town hall meetings, toting guns to political rallies, portraying a President as a (take your pick) monkey, a dictator, a terrorist. Don't exactly wear a Brown Shirt, but, you know, like, um, act like you're a Brown Shirt. Check.

Short - those without health insurance die almost 6 years earlier than those with it. Check.
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What Cicero Had To Say About Traitors - The Radical Right Wing Cashing In On Hatred And Fear

 Everyone should be angry, anxious and ready to counter any and all challenges from the extremist right wing after the fear and hatred extravaganza this weekend at the Lincoln Memorial.

The effrontery to the memory of Martin Luther King and all he stands for is self-evident. The insensitivity is beyond calculation. King had a dream. Beck offers America an Ayn Randian nightmare where radical individualism - the worst of Social Darwinism - will rule our lives.

Should the radical right seize much power, from cradle to grave even the well-educated let alone the poor and struggling, will struggle for a shirnking piece of a shrinking pie.

It sounds like hyperbole, but in all seriousness, this right wing is dangerously anti-American. They are the anti-patriots.

Cicero, in the late 1st century B.C. in one of his speeches, said of different traitors in different times:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. 

But it cannot survive treason from within.

For the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. 

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims,  and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. 

He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague

Speaking of baseness, here are some thumbnail sketches of "Tea Party" type candidates:

• There's health industry executive Rick Scott, the Republican nominee for Governor in Florida whose former company was forced to pay $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud committed during his tenure and who led one of the most birulent anti-health reform groups last year. He's already spent $50 million of his own money to buy the race.

• There's Joe Miller, running for Senate in Alaska. He's questioned the constitutionality of unemployment insurance and wants to phase out Social Security.

• There's Dan Maes, Republican candidate for governor in Colorado, who asserted that efforts in Denver to promote bike riding could "threaten our personal freedoms." (Seriously, he said it.)

• There's Sharron Angle, running for Senate in Nevada, who said she believes there are "domestic enemies" serving in Congress and has urged using "remedies" under the Second Amendment to change that. (Why use ballots when you can use bullets, eh?)

• And then there's Rand Paul, the nominee for Senate in Kentucky, who has said he wouldn't have supported key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act. (Spoken like a true son of privilege.)

• Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, sent an email that shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal," while another depicts hardcore bestiality.

• A leading Tea Party funded Republican candidate for Tennessee's 6th congressional district, Lou Ann Zelenik, condemned the plans for a mosque's expansion in Murfreesboro.

According to a University of Washington study, 46% of Tea Party'ers believe "if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well off as whites." That racist sentiment, held by nearly half of all Tea Party supporters, had already been established by a USA Today poll, and WU study strongly confirmed their findings from July:

Nearly half say blacks lag in jobs, income and housing "because most African Americans just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty."

Over half of all Tea Party'ers believe that immigration (not illegal immigration, mind you) is "changing the culture in the U.S. for the worse" (54%), compared to 32% for everyone else.


When asked if we should single out Muslims or Middle Easterners for airport security stops, 63% of Tea Party supporters said we should, compared to 43% of all voters, a disturbing percentage of all Americans.

Over half of Tea Party'ers believe gays "have too much political power" compared to "the size of their group."

Looking To The 1920s For Insights

We are left with entertaining icons of the 1920's that camouflage the realities that underlay the fascinating decade. Most of all those years appear frantic to us, we who live in a most frantic age.

The flapper, the mobster, the swell, the Babe, Dempsey, Lindbergh, jazz, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the birth of big time Hollywood, the sense of victory in the air, of an America no longer a frisky colt but a thoroughbred upon the world race track.

Underneath that benign anthropology, though, was a dark side of America that has never been fully repressed. The same dark side has surfaced recently under the tutelage of the extreme right wing and its marionettes in the Tea Party.

Notably, these expressions of America's dark side erupt during or immediately after times of severe stress, whether called forth by war or economic dislocation.

While many people, particularly those in big cities and industrial centers, enjoyed the boom, a huge minority were disaffected, angry and anti-everything. Real incomes fell among 70% of all Americans in the so-called Roaring Twenties.

Rural people hated Big Labor. Big Labor despised Big Capital. Big Capital hated regulation. Women were repulsed by drinking men. Protestants hated Catholics and Jews. Old line whites hated southern and eatern European immigrants. The city and country were at loggerheads as farm prices stayed depressed for years. Prices of everything were too high, or prices were too low, depending on whether you were a buyer or a seller.

In the 20's, the Ku-Klux Klan saw its revival blossom not just in the newly assertive South, but in places it is now unimaginable: Oregon, California, parts of the Mid-West, even having mobs in suburban New York and New Jersey.

New York State, which at the time had 6 Socialists in its legislature, tossed them out for being un-American. In fact, most northern and Mid-Western states had socialist members of their legislatures, all of whom were defeated or otherwise deprived of their seats in the 20's.

This was part of the anti-Bolshevik movement that was funded by business interests in order to undermine labor organizing and is commonly called the first "Red Scare." Directly under the outer skin of this conflict lay "buyer's remorse" over the nation's having fought in WWI. Nothing seemed to come of the war and soon enough the Europeans would be at each others' throats once more. So, anti-communism was really about anti-Europeanism to a large extent.

Piled into this swamp was an anti-immigration fervor that makes the goings-on in Arizona look like a cricket match. Responding to the fears of white America, Congress passed two bills in 1924. (Click link for wiki overview of these acts.) The first was the Immigration Act (or Johnson-Reed Bill) part of which was the National Origins Act, and the second, (can you imagine anything more bluntly named?), the Asian Exclusion Act. (Today's border fence, below.)

Finally, the 1920's was a time of enormous technological change, developments rivaling our own era. The automobile became available to the common person; telephone communication was perfected; talkies came into being; the rise of radio began; the phonograph replaced the player piano in homes; and big cities as well as small towns were well-lighted by electric bulbs. While airline companies fledged before WWI, it was in the 1920's that they became fixtures due to a surplus of army aviators and the planes they had flown during the war. Advanced surgery techniques also grew out of the war experience.

These advances unsettled people, especially the older generation and led to a vague anti-technology movement that expressed itself more through skepticism (the Scopes Trial in 1925) tha through direct actions such as sabotage. 

 

 History rarely provides us with direct, one-to-one comparisons. It does often provide us with parallels and examples.

The feeling of a battle between left and right today is a real feeling.

The sense of dislocation from what many people feel is fruitless war conflicts with our natural patriotism.

The decline of real income in the last decade among the lower middle, middle and even upper middle class is a fact. Until 2009, the United States had been in stasis regarding job creation since the year 2000.

The ridiculous bandying about of the term "Socialist" in critiques of the President recalls other Red Scares. (Although it hasn't and won't work this time.)

The anti-immigrant Dengue Fever gripping parts of the country now also has its clear antecedents as described above.

We know that we are in the midst of enormous technological change when we see technocrats like Steve Jobs discussing the up and downsides of the iPhone4 on the front page of the paper or as the third lead story of the evening news.

That big business sees all the disruption and dislocation as a good opportunity for them is also quite clear. Exxon Mobile and the Koch family (owners of the world's largest privately held energy company) fund right wing non-profits who in turn fund the Tea Parties. (See: The Price of Tea, NY Liberal State of Mind, Feb. 12, 2010 by clicking here.)

Business always funds anti-union, anti-environment and anti-people initiatives. Why should it be any different in 2010 than it was in the 1920's?

Income inequality is at its worst since the 1920's. And the rich still don't want to pay their fair share of taxes. That should tell you everything you need to know.
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A Weak Brew On Tax Day

 The Tea Party should be viewed largely as a construct of the right wing media. Except where the only bona fide star of "the movement," quitting governor Sarah Palin, shows her winking face, crowds are scant, at best.

When the outback diva spoke at the Boston Commons on April 14th, 6,000 people attended. That number represents about 1/10 of 1% of Boston's metropolitan area. Of course, if they had given out free bags of M & M's about the same number of people would have shown up and they could have saved Sister Sarah's speaking fee.

For those of us who have witnessed real movements or know them from historical retrospectives - the million-persons-strong peace rallies of the 1960s, 40 consecutive Earth Days, Women's Rights Parades, Gay Rights demonstrations, and, of course, the enormous Civil Rights gatherings of the 1960s - Tea Party affairs qualify as little more than, well, tea parties minus the crumpets and fine china.

There are a host of reasons why the media across the entire spectrum cover the Tea Parties so avidly.

As interesting and at times as electrifying as President Obama is, the day to day running of the government is pretty boring. (Spending half an hour with C-Span observing Senate or House business is like watching paint drying and grass growing at the same time.)

Clearly Fox News wants to goose its thrill-addicted audience daily. It makes good dollar sense. In our binary political world, the center and center-left media then feel compelled to stick their thumbs in the dam to counter the Fox over-coverage of the Tea Party. Thus the out-of-control spiral prolongs itself...

What is the average citizen to make of this so-called movement? How big is it? Is it actually important?

Following is a random selection of attendance figures from around the country where Tea Party rallies were held on April 15th. (For anti-government ideologues, Tax Day is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July all wrapped up in one day.) 

Even if there were one million Tea Partiers on April 15th, they would represent 3/10ths of 1% of America's population.

Note the highlighted editorializing language in some of the excerpts below.

Columbus (OH) Dispatch: In contrast to last year's Tax Day Tea Party at the Statehouse, yesterday's event didn't draw a parade of Republican office seekers. (About 2,000 people showed in Ohio's largest city and its capitol.)

Seattle Times: In Olympia, an estimated 3,000 crowded onto the Capitol steps to advocate less government and lower taxes.

NY Post: An estimated 2,000 people swarmed around the Midtown site carrying signs and waving American flags. (Manhattan)

Chicago Tribune: a crowd of 1,500 in Chicago's Daley Plaza.

Huffington Post: Just under 400 people rallied on the steps of the state Capitol in Springfield, IL.

Des Moines Register: Thursday's tax day rally might not have come as big as advertised - more than 1,000 tea party supporters showed up on the west lawn of the Iowa Capitol - but organizers called it an impressive display of the political force the movement has gained.

Medford (OR) Mail Tribune: Though an exact count of participants wasn't available, several people interviewed said they thought the crowd numbered 700 at the height of the rally.

Salem, OR from the Seattle Post Intelligencer: Hundreds of protesters waving American flags and homemade signs made their way to the steps of the state Capitol to ask for less - taxes and government.

NY Times (Washington Bureau) Before a crowd of a few thousand gathered on Freedom Plaza under bright sun... (in Washington, DC)

Philadelphia Inquirer: At least 1,000 paraded in Boise, Idaho; 500 rallied in Oklahoma City; in Lansing, Mich., 1,000 cheered calls for tax cuts and states rights; about 2,000 rallied Denver and another 2,000 in Colorado Springs. More than a hundred Tea Partiers spent Tax Day 2010 protesting in center city Philadelphia.

Miami Herald: As Tea Partiers across the country held similar rallies, more than 1,000 gathered outside the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale...

Austin Statesman: Tea party activists gathered by the hundreds rather than the thousands at Austin-area rallies to protest big federal government Thursday, the day income tax returns were due.

Fort Collins, Colorado: a protest of about 1,000 residents...

Tampa Fl (Fox News) it became a day of protest with hundreds taking part in a demonstration downtown...

Bloomington Indiana: Hundreds of local residents crowded Showers Plaza.

Charlotte (NC) Observer: around 1,000 people who flocked uptown for a tax day protest like many across North Carolina and the country...

Houston (Fox News): In downtown Houston at Discovery Green, hundreds of people showed up to voice their displeasure with big government...

And in California's Orange County: Irvine, 400; Santa Ana, 250; Yorba Linda, 700.

Randomly, for comparison's sake, ponder the daily number of commuters and visitors to one spot in New York City, Grand Central Terminal: 625,000.

Seems the winds of change are more like a light southerly breeze on a warm spring day.

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The Educated Tea Bag

OK. We already know there are lies, damn lies and statistics. But this week's NY Times/CBS Poll of people who consider themselves part of the Tea Bag movement has generated some particularly bizarre contradictions.

The report summary says: "Fourteen percent of Tea Party supporters have a post-graduate education, compared with 10% for the general public. Twenty-three percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 15% for the general public, according to the poll."

However, the summary also notes, "Although the Constitution requires American presidents to be natural born citizens, as many as 30% of Tea Partiers say they think President Obama was born in another country and another 29% aren't sure." That's a total of 59% in the doubter column.

What colleges and grad schools did these people attend? Has a Tea Bag University been set up without our knowing it?

I can't think of even one post graduate degree holder I know who doesn't believe, or doesn't know if, the President is a natural born citizen. I did know one undergraduate degree holder who had doubts, but a few beers together and the threat of taking a belt sander to his face disabused him of the notion.

62% of Tea Party Activists believe the economy is getting worse in spite of the fact that the stock market has recovered almost 4,500 points since Obama has been in office. And employment figures, while unsteady, are on a definite up trend.

77% have a favorable view of Glen Beck, while 75% have a favorable view of Sarah Palin.

32% believe that violent action against the government is justified. (Maybe we should check THEIR birth certificates. Sound like enemy aliens to me.)

77% get their TV political news from Fox.

What person with a college or graduate degree could possibly name Fox as his or her primary news source? It's like naming Homer Simpson your favorite philosopher, except even Homer is right occasionally.

Of course, a vast majority of the Tea Baggers are "older" Americans, so one must take into account the possibility that their education ceased 50 years ago, or their brains have actually been eroded from all that tube time with Fox.

In Animal House, Flounder is admonished that "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life."

To the Tea Baggers: "Misinformed, angry and scared is no way to spend your twilight years."

Say It With Eggs

At the height of the Health Care Reform rhubarb three weeks back, mellowed-out extremist Pat Bucchanan seized center stage on MSNBC and ranted that during Richard Nixon's second inaugural parade, left wing protestors actually threw eggs at the President's motorcade. The President! Can you imagine?

Never mind that this occurred 37 years ago, and never mind that Nixon was the most fiendish person to ever hold the White House. Never mind the secret war in Cambodia, the politically motivated crack down on anti-war protestors, the enemies list, and a paranoiac hatred of the left stretching back to the 1940s. Bucchanan was still outraged.

The wily old propagandist was conflating the appropriateness of the irresponsible right wing's egging members of Congress today over health care legislation with tossing eggs at a president who kept a mile-long enemies list, broke into Democratic Party headquarters in Watergate, and would leave office in the foul wake of corruption a year and a half later.

*       *      *

My first personal experience with egg throwing as a social statement came in 1961 in my town in the New York suburbs where lived a crotchety man - let's call him Mr. Potter - whose house was guarded round by high thick hedges. His property also adjoined a local empty field where we played baseball.

We hit many baseballs into Potter's yard: never did one come back and never were we allowed to fetch them. This was a major hit to the local children's economy. Balls cost $1 at the time while a weekly allowance might be 10 or 15 cents (if you got one at all). A strategy was devised.

The night before Halloween, 10 of us, the Raw Egg Avengers, were in a dark place literally and figuratively. (The Egg Partiers?)

At exactly 8:30 we struck with coordinated fury then melted into the chill October night. The sound of eggs pelting against the tyrant's house was very satisfying. The next day the local paper had an item in the "Police Blotter." (I kid you not.)

"Vandals!" it said. We were vandals. Well, we knew better as to whom the real vandal was in this case. A thief. A Blue Meanie. A child-hating, anti-baseball zealot.

Long and short of it is that after a few more well-timed eggings, eventually the baseballs came rolling back through Mr. Potter's hedge, competing interests having arrived at an unwritten, mutual settlement.

We had a simple, direct grievance and confronted it with simple, direct action, then stopped. And we were pre-teens not given to deep political contemplation. 

But today's right wing, which is vulgar, uninformed, and basically inchoate in its purpose, is throwing eggs (and racial and anti-Gay epithets) for what seems like no better reason than that they despise government, all government. Their government. One where anyone over 18 may vote. One where anyone may organize, lobby, petition, etc.

Most of the reactionary Tea Partiers have no idea at all what is really in the health reform bill. They just know they don't like it.

Because it comes from government... a duly elected government that happens not to be involved in anti-Constitutional activities and genocide as was the Nixon Administration. (3 to 4 million North and South Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians were killed as a direct result of the war.)

One can believe that health reform is misguided or it grows government too large. But, let's be serious: it doesn't fall into the column of "evil," or "clear and present danger" to the Republic. The extremists are being dishonest with themselves and the nation.

*       *      *

I confess that on a cold January 20th in 1973, I was among the egg-throwers on Pennsylvania Avenue and centered one up on then-Attorney General Richard Kleindienst's head just above the ear. I perched upon the base of a street light pole as my girlfriend handed me the eggs one at a time. I delighted as my friends - and you know who you are - caused the Secret Service to scramble in order to block the incoming eggs headed for Nixon.

Ten months later, Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, one of the most illustrious of the 20th century's Know-Nothings, resigned because he had been caught taking bribes, laundering money, and evading income taxes. Worth an egg or two? I say at least a dozen ostrich eggs were in order.

By August of '74, Nixon, too, because of Watergate, would resign in shame, the only President in U.S. history to do so.

His right wing sympathizing successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon. Nixon would later say he was hounded out of office by the "eastern political establishment" and leftists in the media.

I like to think we just egged him on to quit.

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Follow Up Vid - The Parkinson's Sufferer Who Has Money Thrown At Him By The Tea Partiers

How low are these people to treat a human being this way?

Quick Vid - The True Colors of The Tea Party

This stomach-turning video shows a Tea Partier throwing money at a sufferer of Parkinson's disease.After spitting, racial epithets, Gay-bashing and other forms of hysteria, this isn't really all that surprising. Make sure these people never come to power.

David Brooks Invents The History of The New Left. Thanks!

In today's New York Times, David Brooks, while conflating the Tea Party "tactics" with the "New Left's" mass movement activities, literally invents history. Makes it up. Creates facts from whole cloth and ignores the core of what the New Left was all about, where it came from. (Click for his opinion piece.)

The first thing that Brooks gets wrong (please let me keep my blood pressure in check) is the difference between an organic movement and an inorganic one, or in today's parlance "grass roots" vs. "astro-turf."

The New Left flowed from many, many previous currents in American political thought, while the Tea Party has been born of money provided by the likes of the Koch Energy Corporation and Exxon Mobil in the space of a few months, and is largely a racist response to America's first African American President.

The New Left finds its roots in the Progressive Movement of the 19th century, the Suffragette efforts of the early 20th century, is connected to New Deal philosophies, Ban the Bomb protests of the 1950s and early 60s, and the Anti-Segregation battles of the 60s.

The New Left began to flower politically out of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid 1960s, and came to full fruition during the Anti-Vietnam era. While they have since taken on a life of their own, parallel to New Left politics but not entirely apart from it, the Women's Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the ongoing struggle for racial equality are part of the larger picture.

The New Left has also been a cultural movement through which entirely new modes of art, music, literature, architecture and cultural criticism came into being.

The New Left originally was largely a youth movement.

The New Left did not and does not despise government as a force in American society. What the New Left and its descendants and offshoots fight against are immoral, unjust or unfair features of society often created and perpetuated by government.

Unlike the right, the left does not want to dismantle government, it wants to improve it, even perfect it. Mr. Brooks must be bright enough to understand the distinction.

Were there excesses by factions associated with the New Left in its heyday? Certainly. Although significantly they were considered fringe elements by the mainstream New Left. The vast majority of protests were extremely peaceful. Some were disruptive, and a small handful were violent.

The reaction of authorities and of private citizens who were against the progressive ideas of the New Left were routinely violent and sometimes deadly. Whether it was the murder of children in a Birmingham church in 1963, the murder of innocent college students at Kent State and the murder of two students at Jackson State College in 1970, or the bloody police riots of 1968 in Chicago, the reaction was, to put it kindly, barbaric.

In retrospect, given that the Vietnam War, focal point of the New Left's outrage, ended up killing 3 to 4 million people needlessly, the efforts of the movement seem rather weak-kneed. 60,000 of our own soldiers were killed or left missing while 153,000 were wounded.

In 1967, 400,000 people marched against the war in New York. Two years later in 1969, millions of people in all parts of the country protested against the war. From 1967 through 1973, crowds of 100 to 200,000 routinely showed up in dozens of big cities, nationally and internationally. (Another point about the New Left is that it was actually the largest component of a movement that swept the whole of Western Civilization, particularly in 1968.)

The Tea Party gatherings routinely consist of crowds in the low thousands, and occasionally a crowd in the 20,000 to 25,000 range. It is not a mass movement, but a media phenomenon financed by corporate money that represents a fraction of a fraction of America's polity.

It has even gone so far as to phony up numbers and use "documentary" photos of other gatherings - most notably, ironically, of the Million Man March by African Americans in 1997 - to stretch their crowd counts, a sort of Hamburger Helper method for fringe movements. (See this analysis on PolitiFact.com.) Haven't they at least heard of Photoshop?

The Tea Party is composed mostly of older Americans. It is mostly white (another giveaway as to the racist nature of its thrust). It represents only the disgruntled middle to lower middle classes. (By contrast, the composition of the New Left is as diverse as a movement can grow.)

The Tea Party has no antecedents, unless one considers the John Birch Society and illegal citizen militias. It surely can't claim roots in Nixon's Silent Majority, which was indeed a majority and at the polling place not so silent after all. The Tea Party is more like a Vocal Mini-Minority.

The gravest distinction, which I rephrase from above, is that The Tea Party seeks to destroy government, whereas the New Left set out to eradicate genocidal policies in a pointless war, create true equal rights for all our citizens, and clean up the environment. (Sounds unsettlingly familiar to what the left seeks today, eh?)

The liberal/progressive agenda is, of course, both much broader and particularized now. At the heart of the movement lies a belief in government's potential for good, and the faith that the people can wring that good out of government.

The Tea Party gang, and much, if not the entire right wing, believes that all government is inherently evil and would return us to Thomas Hobbes's "war of all against all." You can see it in their faces. Read it in their foul posters. Hear it in the hoarse shouts of people who have stopped believing in their country.