Tea Party and Conservatives are the Counter-Culture Today- Occupy Wall Street Simply Fights for the Establishment?

The real counter-culture today is not to be found on the left, with the Occupy Wall Street people or in the liberal and progressive blogs on the internet. After all, counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of people who run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day. They aren't 'fringe groups' or 'subgroups'- rather, the counterculture are those people who are the manifestations of the zeitgeist of the day. And the group that best rejects the old way of doing things, the traditional ways of doing things, and offers new and different solutions to the problems facing society today are those people who love freedom and liberty and property rights. Ladies and gentlemen, the new counterculture is the Tea Party, and if you were hip and cool you'd join it.

The 'establishment' of today is not the restrictive, conservative white-picket fence war hero's of the '50's- rather, today the 'establishment' are those very hippies who rose to power and influence reacting against the 'establishment' of that time. Today, those in power and authority are those war-dodging self-righteous selfish drug-using types who now spend their days lecturing others around about being more friendly to the environment or to make peace not war or other meaningless garbage, while they live way beyond their means piling up debt on their children and grandchildren. These so-called 'progressives' control the modern-day Democratic Party and tint the Republican Party as well. Look around you- the entertainers on TV, the comics in the clubs, the celebrities in movies, the musicians- the culture of the day is that of the left, the establishment of politics and the media is that of the liberals, and even “The Man” is a lefty tyrant.

So what then is the new counter culture? As I wrote back in The New Counter Culture: Liberty, it is those people who love life, liberty, and the protection of property who are the new counterculture- rejecting the 'mainstream' big government progressive and liberal policies of the major parties and embracing the soaring rhetoric of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to challenge the status quo and express the ethos of the times. The new rebels are the old rebels once again; those who fight against tyranny and oppression again and take back our nation, and they are to be found in the gatherings and celebrations of the Tea Party's, conservatives, and (to a lesser extent) the Republicans.

The real change in our society, the real difference makers, are those people who are out there at Tea Party's across the nation. Those who are going to shake the world and make a difference are not Harvard-educated community organizers committed to spending money they don't have on social re-engineering schemes while they urinate on themselves and shout about being the '99%'- rather, the counter-culture and cool group of today are those entrepreneurs who are standing up at town halls and yelling 'freedom'. They are the '1%' who are fighting for change and a return to the values that once made our nation great, and that is why their movement is so vibrant and intellectually alive, because they capture the spirit of the day and the direction our nation should go more so than the old hippy establishment culture that is the status quo now.

The Weekly Standard echo's some of these thoughts of mine in its latest article The Reactionary Left, by Matthew Continetti. Here are some of the best parts of it:

...The very notion of a backward-looking left is laughable. Since its inception during the French Revolution, the left has been the party of progress, riding the wave of history to that distant shore where man will cast off the chains of society and live a truly authentic, free, and “natural” life. It’s been the conservatives who have looked in the other direction, tapping the lefties on the shoulder and reminding them that faith and tradition are important guides to human action and shouldn’t be cast off lightly. In contemporary America the equation has been reversed: Tea Party populists support drastic measures to revitalize the American government and economy, while left-wing class warriors want nothing more than to maintain the broken structures of the welfare state....

...What happened to the American left’s utopianism, its sense of adventure, its fearless derring-do? Today’s liberals say conservatives are radicals who want to overturn the American political tradition (as liberals understand it). What remains of the liberal confidence in progress seems to be restricted to the culture, where Americans continue to perform occasional experiments of living. But even the cultural left seems withered, exhausted, ready to go to that big Oneida community in the sky. So what’s a Rousseau to do? Ruminate on his glory days, and pretend that Occupy Wall Street is something more than it is....

...The wistful left reaches back farther when it mimics the class politics of the 1930s. The “99 percent” versus the “1 percent,” Warren Buffett’s secretary versus Warren Buffett, Obama’s attacks on nameless “millionaires and billionaires” are echoes of the rhetoric of Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Franklin Roosevelt. What is puzzling is that the strategy of division and resentment has not had a good track record. To be sure, it worked for FDR. But Roosevelt had 25 percent unemployment, a minuscule federal government, and a sunny disposition. Since LBJ, the spokesmen for American liberalism have been dour and passive and condescending. Their populism has lacked bite because it is a pose. The public has seen through their attempt to rehash the old formula for what it is: “the shield and slogan of the cunning who will rule in the name of equality,” as Martin Diamond once put it.

The longing for the culture of the ’60s, the economy of the ’50s, and the politics of the ’30s is evidence of the left’s failure. No longer able to inspire with a utopian vision of the future, the left has been forced to return to its past. The left’s failure, then, is the right’s victory, because a return to the past is what we’ve been calling for all along....

Check out the whole thing, it's pretty good. Also be sure to check out this article by James Hudnall over at Big Hollywood, which covers some of the same ideas.

UPDATE: Welcome readers of the Right Wing News! Thanks for checking out this post- look around while you are here, I'm sure you'll enjoy other posts that've I've written!