One might get that impression after reading historian Wilfred McClay?s latest Commentary cover story:
[New York Times contributor J.M.] Bernstein placed the Tea Party on the psychiatrist?s couch and came away with a diagnosis of psychopathology. These poor people are terrified by the way that reality challenges their ?deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency? and refuse to accept ?the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action.? They sound very similar to the central Pennsylvanians whom candidate Obama described in a San Francisco fundraiser, pathetic souls who ?cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren?t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.?
Bad as such condescension is, what is worse is the realization that in decades to come, when the Tea Party is safely consigned to the past, those who participated in it may well be spoken of as examples of a pristine American spirit of public-spiritedness and healthy civic engagement, compared to which the then-present iteration of conservatism will be said to pale in comparison.
Then again, maybe not. History never repeats itself exactly, and there is one thing that has changed decisively, or is in the process of changing, which may render this cycle obsolete. What has truly been dying is not conservatism but the intellectual and media environment in which expressions of conservatism can be easily drowned out by the insinuation of a well-publicized psycho-slander coming from an authoritative and monopolistic source. The irrepressible force of the Internet, and its effects in diminishing the importance of the ?legacy? media?i.e., the major television networks, major newspapers, and major newsweeklies?has been and is rightly compared with other communications revolutions of the past, such as the invention of movable type, which broke down hierarchical and centralized sources of information-gathering and production, opening them up and producing large democratizing changes. It is hard to imagine that the vast expansions of government power that have occurred in the past 80 years would have happened as easily in the kind of decentralized communications environment that exists today. In this respect as in others, the Obama administration has found it very hard to follow in the path of the New Deal or the Great Society.