Tunku Varadarajan On David Brooks, Cultural Supremacy and the Tea Party Movement

EVERY TIME I read NYU business professor, Hoover Institute fellow and British writer Tunku Varadarajan---who contributes at The Daily Beast--- I like him better. He's level-headed, fair and generally a good centrist thinker and writer. In his piece today, In Defense of Tea Parties, Tunku calls out intellectual elites who sneer at the tea party movement, starting with friend David Brooks whom he calls a cultural supremacist, saying Brooks and others look down at this these people (that would include me) at their peril.

In this age of ossified career politicians---who think they're accountable to none of their grassroots electorate---he sees promise in political amateurs that make this grassroots movement. Writing about one of Brook's recent columns on this phenomenon Tunku opines unrepentantly:

His (Brook's) column was about the Tea Party movement, which has, in the space of a year, come to inhabit—and inhabit raucously—the landscape that Brooks parses from his lofty perch. In the piece, he sets up a dialectic between “the educated class” on the one hand, and, on the other, a force that he identifies variously as “public opinion,” the “opposition,” and “the Tea Party movement.” The latter, a “fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” are, David writes, reflexively opposed to the beliefs of the educated class (to which he, naturally, belongs). They are, in effect, reactionaries.

Wow. Nothing like a smart man who can take a smart, intellectual elitist man down a notch or two. But wait! There's more--it only gets better:

Put to one side, for the moment, David’s exaggeratedly Hamiltonian belief in the natural leadership abilities of people like him, and ask this: What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated?

I wish I had written and wielded this lovely rhetorical dagger, but clearly destiny chose Tunku to address Brooks instead. Tanku continues in an I beg your pardon sort of way:

Forgive me, here, for bringing to the discussion a personal note. I have a cousin who is a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan. She is a Tea Party supporter, and she wrote me these words in an email: "I laugh, but also feel indignant, when I read that the tea parties are filled with angry white men, because it’s obvious that reporters are not attending the same tea parties I attended. The events were a mix of young and old, VERY mixed ethnicities (but yes, a majority white). Everyone to a person was courteous and polite, and the best part was the signs, which were funny and clever. It did feel very grassroots and very much a movement fueled by the people rather than by shadowy party apparatchiks. It felt cool to think that we were not going to be taken in by government and be told what was good for us. (Does that sound really hokey?) It felt good to be a part of a group of people who were saying “enough!” I’m a huge supporter of the tea party movement because I think it exists outside of the traditional parties and is a true manifestation of the voice of the citizen."

While Tunku grants not all tea partiers are Wellesley graduates, he allows as how his cousin is considered a member of “educated class,” the same high perch to which Brooks clings as he looks down with scorn on us tea party peasantry. Tunku warns the Brooks crowd their disdain is not just irritating, but down right dangerous. The left fears a tsunami of losses in the next election cycle, while the right fears it might mess up its plans to take the country back from liberal lawmakers.

Tunku predicts the rise of the populist tea party movement is here to stay and fueled as much by wounded pride at being looked/ talked down to by intellectual elites, as driven by economic concerns. He concludes:

So by this reckoning, the Tea Parties would be a very serious development in which anti-big business forces would finally join with anti-big government forces to create a genuine free-market party that would maximize the opportunities of the little guy—like this small-business owner from California.

See my right side-bar for the video. And thank you Tunku Varadarajan for your fine piece.