Sam Barr lambasts the Crimson for “condescending” the Tea Partiers:
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.
I understand the need to call a spade a spade. Honesty matters, especially in politics. (And sentences like those published in the Crimson are deeply dishonest: “Surface theatrics aside, the Tea Party is nearly alone in asking serious questions about the meaning of politics in America.” How can such an assertion be refuted? How can it be accepted?) The truth is, as Sam says, the Tea Party movement is is filled with some ignorant and violent people.
But that’s not the final word. It’s barely the first word. To open up a broader dialogue, to ask questions like “Why does our country, uniquely it seems, have such a special group of crazies? Is it our culture? Our history? Our dwindling base of Scott-Irish angry white people?” and “How did their voice get so salient? Is it the “new media”? Is it their astro-tuft roots corporate sponsors? Or is this a real force to reckon with in American politics?” — to ask those question, frankly, is to shift the debate to a place where it might actually achieve something. You defeat crazy people not by yelling at them “you’re ignorant and crazy!” but by understanding the circumstances of their political power, and then altering those circumstances. If you can’t convince people to change their minds, then you attempt, through politics, to defeat them. You out organize them. You out educate the people around them. You starve them of attention. You out vote them. That’s how politics works. Name calling might be honest, and it might be cathartic, but it doesn’t do much good, and I’d personally prefer to see less of it.
