I really don’t understand the impulse among many Harvard students (if the Crimson is any guide) to pat the Tea Partiers on the head and say, “I don’t agree with you, but you’re totally what this country is all about.” No, they’re not. They’re just crazy. Do they sometimes “ask the right questions”? Yes, absolutely. Reading Monday’s illuminating New York [...]
The tea-party movement has always contained potentially contradictory strains of populism and libertarianism. Back when we were bailing out the big banks, these strands coincided: conservatives could say, look, Obama is giving your money away to Wall Street fat cats and he’s interfering in the free market. But now that Obama is proposing to recoup the bailouts with a tax [...]
In a culture that often values boldness above all else, American politics is surprisingly allergic to big ideas. Despite the clamor over President Obama's health-care reform plan, it is important to remember that it proposes fairly incremental changes.
