If you are a fan of slangy neologisms, I suppose.

The Tea Parties

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush’s first term. The claim that they don’t have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They’re anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don’t also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think. The claim that they’re hypocritical and partisan is a bit stronger – where were they when Bush was running up the deficit, etc. – but in fairness, many of the organizing figures were anti-TARP from the beginning, and there’s something slightly odd about saying that if you didn’t take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren’t allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely …

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they’ve brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

–Ross Douthat

Perhaps folks here buy this comparison, find the situations perfect analogues. But regardless of the extent that is true, this is where a focus on style and theatrics over substance, merit, and relative weight of the matters being protested leads us. If any demonstration is rendered unserious by the presence of a few off-message sign-carriers, we might as well discard it as a mode of public communication. That would be a bad outcome for those citizens wishing to communicate opposition to future unjust wars, as well as for future expressions of the sentiment behind our current ersatz tax uprising (though I’d like to suggest those two results are not of equal consequence for the country at large). I don’t think we want to go out of our way to marginalize political demonstrations more than they already have been in the culture. They have played an essential role throughout our history, and to downplay the significance of protests that in the main (discounting for the inevitable static in gatherings of any significant size) carry a clear political message and evidence of any considerable level of support for it is really just to downplay the seriousness of the issues we face in todays world vis-a-vis previous generations.

Aren’t most judges members? Or at least honorary? At the least, they are super sympathetic to cops no matter what.

Yeah, heaven forfend that anyone be aware of the Israeli Lobby’s sway or advocate a united, non-racist, secular Palestine along the lines of, oh, South Africa. That would be totally un-serious, of course.

I have a thing about bloggers posing as “just commenters” on their own sites, though, I admit that. So you discount my view by a bit.

My view was that Freddie’s entire point was that, whatever their shortcomings, public protest (in his view, especially on the left) is essential to the functioning of our democracy, and such fippant dismissals as are routinely accomplished by reference to marginal but persistent causes such as Mumia are really destructive and in bad faith. That was his larger point, but Thompson continued to pursue the specific question of Mumia in the comments, beyond just an initial clarification that it wasn’t his central point either (though Freddie’s point is that it doesn’t need to be; it can just be used as a throwaway to devastating effect in producing real marginalization of important dissent). He continued to pursue the Mumia inquiry for several more interchanges, thus essentially taking over the thread and preventing Freddie’s points from being explored. This, of course, would be fine if it was one of your readers doing this, but I found it quite striking behavior for an official contributor to a site of self- described Gentlemen. I would have thought that one of the principal values of Gentlemanly discourse to be preserved in such a place would be an exquisite sensitivity to the full meaning and intent of the arguments of one’s interlocutors, and a desire for those to be clearly understood and discussed in their best possible light. I thought Mr. Thompson’s treatment of Mr. Freddie’s arguments to fall substantially short of that aim, and my comment was a reaction to that.