David Brooks on New Left and Tea Party similarities

The Wal-Mart Hippies
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 4, 2010
New York Times

David Brooks has an op-ed, The Wal-Mart Hippies, in which he links the 2010 Tea Party movement to the 1960's New Left; saying the Tea Party is studying some of the classic books and thinkers of the 60's New Left. Below are two paragraphs from The Wal-Mart Hippies.

"To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

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."

-David Brooks

For me , it was surprising to see Brooks studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for Rules for Radicals, etc. I've been studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for those exact same books for the last two weeks. Why? Those same books are being purchased when people are buying my book: Manual for Redneck-Technologist Power and Empire: Enslaving and Exterminating Anarcho-Primitivist Pacifist Vegetarian Communities After the Apocalypse (look at the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section of page).

The Wal-Mart Hippies are buying my book.

The irony of all this New Left / New Right kinship is my Manual for Redneck-Technologist... explores "rednecks" in the dream world of 60's radicalism: a world where The Establishment has fallen. But in that day of anarchism, my book points out the opportunity for rednecks to enslave hippies. Brooks says Tea Partiers, like their leftist counterparts of the 60's, don't really have a plan for if their revolution succeeded. Well, my book satirically envisions such a plan, and Tea Party people are buying it, and praising it. And in Manual for Redneck-Technologist... the hippies are not studied or respected, they are the object of exploitation.