Michael Lind — How the Tea Party Has You Fooled

In recent essays for Salon I have argued that progressives and mainstream pundits are making a profound mistake by treating Tea Party radicalism as an outburst of irrationality by moronic “low information” yokels, rather than understanding it as a calculated (if not necessarily successful) strategy by the regional elite of the South and its allies in other regions.... 

I have also argued that the Tea Party is not a new movement that sprang up as a result of spontaneous populist anger against Wall Street bailouts in the Great Recession, but rather the “newest right,” the most recent incarnation of an evolving right-wing tradition that goes back beyond Reagan and Goldwater to mostly Southern roots.... 

Against progressives and pundits who insist on blaming the white working class for Tea Party radicalism, I have argued that the radical right agenda serves the interest of the economic elites of the South and some areas in the Midwest and other regions — particularly those whose business models are threatened by unions, high minimum wages and environmental regulations....

If it wants to live up to its claim of being “the reality-based community,” the American center-left needs to dispense with the half-century-old anti-working-class mythology of Hofstadter and Adorno and look at real-world electoral and opinion data, for a change. By refusing to recognize that today’s right-wing radicalism serves the interests of elites — in particular, Southern elites — and blaming it erroneously on the non-Southern white working class, progressives only harm themselves, not least by confusing their enemies with their potential allies.

AlterNet
How the Tea Party Has You Fooled
Michael Lind

Originally posted at Salon: Michael Lind, Tea Party is an anti-populist elite tool. And it has progressives fooled

This is not some spontaneous uprising. It's the newest incarnation of a rich, elite, right-wing tradition