Ross Douthat on the Tea Parties

From what appears to be Ross Douthat's penultimate post on his Atlantic blog, before his move to the New York Times op/ed page ("The Tea Parties"):

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think. The claim that they're hypocritical and partisan is a bit stronger - where were they when Bush was running up the deficit, etc. - but in fairness, many of the organizing figures were anti-TARP from the beginning, and there's something slightly odd about saying that if you didn't take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren't allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely ...

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

In those two paragraphs we may have the case for Douthat as a New York Times token conservative columnist distilled. In the first paragraph Douthat makes a gesture of standing athwart the spending tsunami and... noting that it's troubling; in the second paragraph he expresses his disdain for the grassroots conservative rabble that has been protesting this same spending tsunami. For good measure, Douthat finishes with a soupçon of hypocrisy in that last sentence, where he parrots the snark of the Washington Insider's David Weigel (see the caption below the third photo), while mocking protesters for "parroting talk radio tropes".

The handy graphic above comes from Douthat's post.

"More Suley than Sully"

From Peggy Noonan's last column in the Wall Street Journal, Is 'Octomom' America's Future? (Hat tip: Doug Kass¹):

It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don't approve are limited, which must be sad for them.

[...]

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn't have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

The image above, by Martin Kozlowski, accompanies Noonan's column on the WSJ website.

¹I hadn't read one of Noonan's columns in a while, but was prompted to do so by Doug Kass's quote from the one above in his new post, "Fear and Loathing on Wall Street". Kass quoted the first part of Noonan's column, which described a shuttering of shops in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods. Kass included it as a sort of contrarian indicator of sentiment in his tentatively bullish post.