That’s the title of this piece by Charles Cooke at National Review Online. While I sympathize with at least some of the Tea Party’s complaints and proposals, I also have my disagreements with it, and in general find its rhetoric simplistic if not entirely wrong. I don’t believe, for instance, that excessive taxation is, in itself, a major source of our problems.
But I don’t like seeing any group of people unfairly demonized, and I object strongly to the bigotry which liberals have exhibited toward the Tea Party. It seems to have been triggered by some kind of reflex, first in advance of evidence and then in spite of it. I know a few people who jumped right on it, and my respect for them was permanently damaged by the spectacle of their eagerness to join in the bigotry. The first rallies had hardly made it into the news before liberals in and out of the media rushed to label the group “racist.” The most egregious instance of alleged racism, when a group of black congressmen were said to have been abused, seems to have been at least greatly exaggerated, if not entirely invented, as significant bounties offered for proof had no takers.
For those who don’t want to bother reading Cooke’s piece, I’ll reproduce this paragraph, as it gets at the way liberalism betrays its own core principles with this sort of thing. Cooke singles out three categories of people responsible for the organized slur: first, “almost everybody at MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama administration, and the parade of political operatives who work around the clock to make politics intolerable for everyone.” (I love that last item.) Second are “genuinely dangerous Americans who do not grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political opposition in a free republic.” And:
The third group is perhaps the most interesting, for it is full of people who have become precisely what they fear. When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America. The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has observed that the more genuinely vexed among the movement’s detractors believe the group to be “an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.” Douthat correctly explains that “the historical term for this kind of anxiety is ‘Brown Scare’ — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past.”
The Ross Douthat piece that Cooke links to is worth reading, too.
Light On Dark Water 
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