Tea Partiers Are the New Hippies

The anti-establishment types in the Tea Party movement remind David Brooks of another group of protesters who wanted to bring power back to the people and stick it to The Man. The Tea Partiers have adopted many of the tactics the New Left used in the 1960s, from street theater to mass rallies to extreme statements designed to shake up the masses, Brooks writes in the New York Times.

Both movements are big believers in mass action and are "built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures," Brooks writes. The New Left, like today's Tea Partiers, had a point, but ruined it through "their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism." The Tea Party movement will never end up running the country, Brooks writes, but supporters show that the '60s "political style will always be with us." (More Tea Party stories.)