Sean Wilentz has done it again, and we doubt that the Tea Baggers will like it. Wilentz is a Princeton University history professor who often writes about modern culture; in 2006 he wrote the infamous Rolling Stone Magazine article which assessed George W. Bush as possibly the "worst president in U.S. history". Oh, how quickly we forget the disaster that was Ronald Reagan, but we digress.
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Anyway, Wilentz has written a new article for The New Yorker Magazine in which he traces the origins of the current "Tea Party" back to the paranoid politics of the 1950's. We're not going to summarize the entire article here, but we listened to Wilentz's interview with Terry Gross on NPR yesterday, and Wilentz tells an interesting tale.
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The John Birch Society was the organization in the 1950's and 60's which drove the crazy bus of paranoia about communism. The John Birchers saw evil communists everywhere they looked, (they believed that FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were all part of a communist conspiracy), and worked to help Barry Goldwater become the Republican nominee for President in 1964. Wilentz explained that no less than William F. Buckley, the conservative's conservative, who had originally helped Robert Welch, the founder of the JBS, was later disturbed by his extremist views and went to Goldwater and told him that if he didn't disassociate himself from the group that Goldwater would hurt the conservative cause for decades. And Buckley was right. A "real conservative" candidate didn't take the White House again until Reagan won in 1980.
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Wilentz makes the point that we've believed for some time now, that the "Tea Party" is possibly going down the same road as the John Birchers of years ago. Their crazy opinions might win them some Congressional seats in the short-term, but when America really gets an up-close-and-personal look at their beliefs, the Tea Baggers could set the Republican Party back for decades.
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