NYT Book Review
THE BACKLASH: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $25.99.
In his new book, “The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama,” the progressive journalist Will Bunch serves up his own anatomy of the Tea Party movement, that loose agglomeration of right-wing insurgents, libertarians, conservatives, evangelicals, survivalists, gun-rights crusaders, antitax protesters, deficit hawks, antigovernment zealots, militia members, Ayn Randers, Limbaugh “ditto heads,” Glenn Beck fanatics, birthers, Birchers, and supporters of Sarah Palin and Ron Paul.
As Mr. Bunch sees it, there are three main reasons for the rise of the Tea Party:
1. “Genuine anger and panic by rank-and-file conservatives” who were deeply frustrated by the election of Barack Obama, and who “suddenly saw a world in which — thanks to a growing electoral base that did not think or look like them — their Reaganist conservative philosophy might be shut out of power for good.”
2. “The electronic media” — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled “like-minded Obama naysayers” to come together “without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president’s birth certificate.”
3. “The ever-circling capitalists — the policy pushers who saw a new grass-roots movement as a back-door way to revive the big-business agenda” that had thrived from the 1980s through the George W. Bush era, along with “the pure-profit hucksters” eager to cash in on voter anger.
(More here.)
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