Mark: Thanks. Yeah, the Lind piece — like so much of his work — was really interesting and almost entirely unpersuasive. Because of Lind’s complicated and undeservedly ballyhooed defection from the right, he carries more baggage about conservatism than the stevedore’s union. He seems locked in to an analysis that at least had superficial plausibility in the late 1990s. In fact, his one concrete example of conservatives “dropping out” comes from 1999 when Paul Weyrich wrote that silly letter virtually no one — no one but Lind — took very seriously. Lind writes:
In a letter to other conservative activists in 1999, the late Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, called on the right to adopt an explicitly countercultural strategy. “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority,” Weyrich wrote. “I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.”
Echoing the back-to-the-land hippies of the ’60s and ’70s left, Weyrich called on conservatives to secede from American society and form their own subcultural communities. “And while I’m not suggesting that we all become Amish or move to Idaho, I do think that we have to look at what we can do to separate ourselves from this hostile culture.” Weyrich concluded by holding up the countercultural left as a model for the new countercultural right: “The radicals of the 1960s had three slogans: turn on, tune in, drop out. I suggest that we adopt a modified version.”
It’s a useful quote for Lind’s thesis. But if Lind were more honest, he’d at least acknowledge that nobody on the right — including Weyrich! — subsequently followed that advice.
And, as a I suggested in the column, and as you note, the whole reason Lind is writing about the Tea Party movement in the first place is that the Tea Party movement has done the exact opposite of what Weyrich called for. Other than being completely wrong and passé, Lind’s argument on this score is brilliant.