Greg Sargent flags a funny quote from a Tea Party leader:
"Throughout American history, successful movements -- abolitionists, women's suffragists, the civil rights movement, the conservative movement, et cetera -- all had their own print publications."
Sargent goes on to explain the historical context of these other historical movements other than "the conservative movement," the violence and repression they faced because they were attempting to overturn long established social orders rather than preserve them. But the other thing the abolitionists, the civil-rights movement, and the suffragists all had in common was that the historical antecedents to today's conservative movement were steadfastly opposed to them.
These factions don't map neatly onto today's partisan divides, but suffice it to say that the language of nullification first used by Confederates to defend slavery is now employed in defiance of the Affordable Care Act, the 19th Amendment was adopted during the hated Progressive Era and championed by the admittedly problematic (to say the least) conservative nemesis President Woodrow Wilson, and between conservative icon William F. Buckley sanctioning racist terrorism in the South and Barry Goldwater's crusade against the Civil Rights Act, it's somewhat amusing to see conservatives claim the civil-rights movement.
Amusing, but not unexpected. Glenn Beck, after all, is the movement's unofficial "historian," and he's pretty much invented his own version of history during which "progressives" were responsible for everything bad and conservatives for everything good. Beck's revisionist binary is a bad thing, of course, but on the other hand, conservatives identifying themselves with them is also a kind of progress, since it symbolizes how universal once radical ideas have become.
But as far as identifying the Tea Party movement among them, yeah, I think we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. And doesn't the Tea Party already have a full blown PR operation in Fox News?
