Conservative Donnybrook

The developing MSM and liberal memes holding that yesterday’s “tea parties”: 1. were basically a corporate-sponsored “astroturf” movement, and 2. were attended by a collection of paranoid right-wing kooks – can be seen playing themselves out in Krugman’s latest column:

These parties … have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so. … President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

Yeah. That is really, really bizarre. That this black-helicopter crowd should find anything to worry about in  Obama’s shoveling of untold trillions into massive bailouts and other black holes and Bernanke’s unprecedented, frenzied money-pumping, and conclude that it might all somehow affect their tax burden at some point and maybe increase the scope of government power — hey, Krugman’s an economist, tin-foil fools, and he thinks everything’s fine. Anyone can see that Obama is basically a moderate tax-cutter!

Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

Well, that criticism hits home and it doesn’t. Yes, Obama’s bailouts are basically Bush policies squared, and Ben Bernanke is a Bush appointee, but first, these tea parties represent a coalition that includes libertarian don’t-tread-on-me types who never identified with the GOP as well as Hannitoid Republicans, and second, regardless of who agreed with whom who did or said what way back when, this current unrest is coming out of a genuine and correct sentiment that the unfolding situation is unprecedented and scary, and needs to be resisted.

Clicking over to this FreedomWorks thing’s website, it does look kinda astroturf-ey, and it sports a DC mailing address. But I had never heard of it before, it’s one of many groups organizing the rallies, and it’s clear that Krugman and his allies are blowing its role out of proportion for rhetorical advantage. Also, it’s unclear why huge corporations would have any problem at all with Obama’s policies — what, they don’t like being bailed out? Who’s supposed to be sponsoring FreedomWorks, Goldman Sachs?

But the fact that the libertarian position is vulnerable to these charges at all is a symptom of the damage that has been done by conservative and libertarian identification with the GOP and its shills over the years. Apparently Newt Gingrich descended upon the New York tea party to give the headline speech. Great. The tea parties are not an astroturf movement, but you could say that the likes of Newt, Fox News, and Sean Hannity are trying to astroturf-ize it, and harness the conservative masses’ discontent as a way to help kick Team Blue out of office and get Team Red back in, with the only possible significant result being that popular discontent will have been neutralized. This is what the association of libertarianism and conservatism with the GOP and its shills has done for us.

Incidentally, Richard Spencer of Takimag had a good take on all of this. He writes, “whenever I read articles like [Krugman's], I find myself wishing that the GOP base actually were just as ‘crazy’ as establishment liberals like Krugman think it is.”