I’m fascinated by the Tea Party- a fascination laced with horror, of course, since I don’t share their beliefs and sort of can’t understand where they are coming from. I keep waiting for them to laugh and be done with it. Sarah Palin as your keynot speaker? Glenn Beck is a thought-leader? Is it still Halloween and I didn’t notice?

It’s probably similar to the way the majority of conservatives looked at the hippies in the 60’s- wondering what those kids were up to and what they were smoking out there- that’s probably the best thing I can think about to describe what I think when I see a report on the Tea Party- “What are you smoking?”

David Brooks wrote a provocative opinion column in the NYTimes this morning, drawing parallels between the hippies of the 60’s, who he calls the New Left, and the protesters on the “New Right.” He says their similarities outweigh their differences.

He says: “These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.”

Now that is interesting. Amazon groups books for suggested reading based on what other people who buy the book you are buying have bought. Rules for Radicals is a classic of protest culture- a culture that until recently would have nothing to do with Unholy Alliance or Liberal Fascism. What is going on?

Well, as Brooks points out, there is a mass movement similar to the 60’s going on- one that is calling out the ruling class as not doing a very good job. And they aren’t, we can all agree on that. The Tea Party movement is just mad, and very anti-authority. In fact, they rabidly argue against any kind of authority, rejecting even the idea of anointing a Tea Party leader. They are very big on participatory democracy, though not very big on setting forth any central beliefs other than that the government should stay out of their business- certainly out of their wallet.

I love the idea that there is a conservative protest movement. It sounds very colonial- Taxes are bad! Less government! Stay out of my business! Sounds an awful lot like where this country got started. If we could only get that block of outcry to team up with the liberal social agenda, well, we’d have something going that would transform the country. Oh, wait, that would be called libertarianism, right?

Take a generation of hippies turning into grandparents and a generation of parents turning into Tea Party conservatives and what do you get from the youth? Add in social media and a whole mess of entertainment saturation that they are used to getting for free and I’ll tell you- A generation who wants the government to stay out of their business and doesn’t mind if people do whatever they want with their own lives. 20 years from now, the country’s first Libertarian president. Watch it.

Photo Credit: Susan E Adams (via Flickr under CCL)