Up the Down Staircase

New candidate for worst historical analysis of the Tea Party movement and our current political moment: the consistently denser-than-a-poundcake Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, who wrote last week (via) that we can understand the Tea Party by applying Hannah Arendt's observations about totalitarianism. "As we have known since Lenin’s day," Cohen warned, "a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority."

And so if the Tea Party wins, dire consequences will follow: "The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States. It has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue. The domestic economy will suffer and the gap between rich and poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen. International relations will lack a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law, and the bad guys will be freer to be as bad as they want."

They want to shrink the central government, diminish its authority and reach, and create a world that will "lack a dominant power." This is totalitarianism. We all remember how the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century frantically worked to reduce their power and create a world without centralized authority, like Lenin did. Remember when Wavy Gravy led the blackshirts into Rome? Because, man, Richard Cohen totally does. The world will not soon forget how Stalin told the Ukrainian kulaks to totally just, like, whatever, dude, follow your bliss, we want a world that lacks a dominant power. That rug really tied the room together.

Take a valium, folks. It's possible to sustain strong criticisms of the Tea Party, and put them in a historical context, without losing your mind.