re: #39 stabby

It’s just Bircher nonsense. It’s nothing new.

Indeed, there is nothing new or original in tea party thinking. These ideas have been percolating through the fringe right at least since the 1950s, and some since the time of FDR. My copy of the JBS “bible,” The Hidden Hand, dates from 1977 but reads like a Tea Party primer. It’s all there: The Federal Reserve and the gold standard, welfare bums as a purchased constituency, Marxist plotters and agents of influence in academia, government regulation as part of a unified and hidden agenda, and elitist manipulators in the media. The only thing that is new is the magnitude of their influence over mainstream politics. Even that is not entirely new- Bircher support has always figured in at least some Republican candidacies- but the far right has never before managed to bring the party as a whole to disaster and the brink of extinction. That is a very real possibility now. The final result will depend on the outcome of a struggle for dominance that will unfold over the next four years.