More on what the NYT called the "intellectual ballast" of the Tea Party

Xenophon kindly shares a Reason.com article where they get as hysterical as Jeff Tucker. It must be very tense to always be in combat mode.

Interestingly enough, Lew Rockwell at Mises.org explicitly makes the argument that Jeff Tucker attributes to the New York Times - namely, that the Tea Party has a weak intellectual foundation and that it's going to betray the "party of liberty" (whoever that is... Lew doesn't say but I'm pretty sure I'm not invited to that party).

So we have the New York Times informing people about the treatises and books motivating the Tea Party and Lew Rockwell suggesting the intellectual underpinnings of the Tea Party are weak, and yet Steve Horwitz and Jeff Tucker and Reason.com are going after the New York Times... why? Because the Times said that Bastiat was outdated for worrying about beggars and vagabonds getting the vote? This is quite strange - these people are itching to fight. It's like the recent Krugman articles on war. Even when people agree with him they still write something up insisting he said something he never said, because disputing Krugman (or the New York Times, or [fill in the blank]) is so ingrained for them.

My feeling on the Tea Party? Look - it's a big diverse group. Many are very well educated. Many are somewhat educated, but reading some pretty good stuff like Bastiat and Hayek. It would of course be nice if they read other stuff too - but five years ago a lot of them probably weren't reading any of this stuff. I agree with Lew that it's largely a populist movement and not a libertarian movement, and I'm shocked at how many libertarians have embraced a populist political force. That might be the most disappointing thing of all. I've had differences with libertarians (obviously), but the one nice thing about libertarians is that they usually don't go off the populist deep end. The embrace of the Tea Party makes me worry a little more about that than I used to. I think the Tea Party will eventually fizzle out - I don't think it's a game changer in any long-term sense. But it will be important in the next several years. And when it does fizzle out, maybe I won't pull out my hair over some of their historical and constitutional revisionism. I think it's a genuine movement, it's a well-intentioned movement. It could only be a dangerous movement if some malign force within it sparks something, but there's nothing about the movement now that's particularly worrisome. And ultimately it's just as political as any other movement we've ever seen (which is another odd thing - to see people argue that it somehow transcends politics... the need to explicitly make that argument is a sure sign that it's not true).