'Commonsense Conservatism' and the Wal-Mart Woodstock

This weekend I will join a few friends to attend a “Taking Back Our Country” rally in Tulsa, Okla., what New York Times faux-Conservative columnist David Brooks would no doubt dub the beginning of the Wal-Mart Woodstock. That it’s being held in Tulsa should bring the pain from those on both coasts, Donkeys and moderate GOPers alike, who no doubt hate having to share a country with a place as corn-fed as my native Oklahoma. I guess everyone has someone to look down on – I live in southern Oklahoma, a place Tulsans no doubt refer to as “drive-through country.”

The event is an egalitarian super-show that is sure to horrify whichever journalists from the Times et al who draw the short straw and are forced to cover it, assuming they cover it at all. The idea that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are being preceded by two country music stars no doubt sounds like the fifth circle of hell, the extreme epicenter of Conservative self-indulgence. I’m sure equal shock was measured when no monster truck show was announced to follow Palin’s keynote, and not one witch has been rounded up for the locals to burn once the event concludes.

My friends and I were joking that Sarah Palin is the only spoken-word tour in the world that could get us to pony up $114 for a show. A second interest in attending this event, the one which today’s piece concerns, is the future of what Gov. Palin called “Commonsense Conservatism” in Going Rogue, and what I’ve always considered just plain Conservatism. It seems that some people don’t consider Tea Party types (or Palin or Beck or anyone else who actually exhibits the values of Conservatism) Conservative.

Curiously, my politics probably more closely align with Beck than they do with Gov. Palin, yet I don’t care for Beck (and haven’t since I read his bargain-bin’d book The Real America way back when) while I continue to support Gov. Palin as the only popular political figure who can undo the Gordian knot of regress the current Administration is hell-bent on tying, the kind of progressive riddle that serves only to set back American progress a generation.

The Tea Parties are populist and grass roots by nature, and have been wholly effective of scaring the daylights out of the status quo types who don’t like to answer questions from people who aren’t dressed like them. That Brooks’s latest piece compares the contemporary Tea Parties with the New Left of the 1960s is continued evidence that David Brooks, to this day, has still not attended a Tea Party protest. In his piece, The Wal-Mart Hippies, Brooks writes:

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor.

I wonder which “polite society” it is Brooks is referencing? Is it to the one that has taken pre-juvenile delight in calling the millions of people who attend these rallies a sexual slur? Is it the polite society that continues running with every single non-truth rumor floated about Gov. Palin by anonymous sources? I always thought of polite society as the bourgeois, i.e. the middle class. Brooks refers to the Tea Partiers as such earlier in his latest installment of better-than-thou condescension – so, which is it? Are the Tea Parties bourgeois, or are the Tea Parties offending polite society? Is it possible to offend oneself? Surely “polite society” doesn’t mean the polite society of journalists and politicos who rolled over like a stuffed puppy so Candidate Obama could scratch its belly and tell it that it’s a good boy.

My experience with the Tea Party movement (and with fans of Beck and supporters of Palin) has been that it’s made up of a) people who work for a living, pay taxes, own businesses and hold private property who b) resent being told they’re too ignorant to know what’s in their own best interest while c) watching their representatives actively not represent them by spending us into oblivion, taking over sectors of the economy and trying to force a wildly unpopular healthcare fiasco down our throats.

The Conservatism Palin has discussed, the Conservatism that the Tea Parties largely want (they are certainly not one in the same), is one of lower taxes, heavy spending cuts, an end – or at the very least, a push back against – the crony capitalism on display recently, and, regarding healthcare, scrapping the current monstrosity. Other facets of Conservatism include fighting the War on Terror, strong national defense, protecting our national interests and the interests of our allies. I guess Brooks will have none of that, as he goes in for the kill near the end of his piece:

For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

Hmm. If only a famous political figure had written a book covering this ground, a book that has sold more than two million copies. I guess Brooks didn’t read Going Rogue, since Gov. Palin covers this ground pretty firmly. Beginning on page 384, she writes:

What does it mean to be a Commonsense Conservative? At its most basic level, conservatism is a respect for history and tradition, including traditional moral principles. I do not believe I am more moral, certainly no better, than anyone else, and conservatives who act “holier than thou” turn my stomach. So do some elite liberals. But I do believe in a few timeless and unchanging truths, and chief among those is that man is fallen. This world is not perfect, and politicians will never make it so. This, above all, is what informs my pragmatic approach to politics.

I don’t know any Tea Party people or Palin supporters who want to overthrow the government or tear down the establishment. I am among those, though, who see a Washington that has lost touch of what its original establishment was, and I look forward to the kind of civic action citizens can take to change this: throwing many of the bums out in 2010, and throwing a great many more of them out in ’12. That will be change I can believe in.