The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: What the Tea Party Really Wants

Glenn Beck addressing supporters at his Restoring Honor rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Did Glenn Beck tap into the anger of those gathered in Washington on Aug. 28?

Gail Collins: David, did you go to the Glenn Beck rally in Washington last weekend?
David Brooks: I did and I have to confess I really enjoyed it. I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights.
Gail Collins: I’m so glad we have columnists living in different cities. If a trillion Tea Party types gather at the Lincoln Memorial you’re there. And then of course if Justin Bieber makes a personal appearance at MTV in Manhattan, I’m right around the corner. Really, we’ve got all of American culture covered.

If there was a political message at Saturday’s rally, it was that many people think America’s peril is fundamentally spiritual, not economic.

David Brooks: Gail, forgive me, but I think you’re being complacent here. We have no Op-Ed columnists in Los Angeles so we have missed out on all the issues raised by the Lindsay Lohan phenomenon. Can we look ourselves in the face and say we have given proper weight to the Miley Cyrus-Hannah Montana dichotomy? I don’t think so.
Gail Collins: Did I ever tell you that one day I walked past the auditorium next to our lobby and there was Bristol Palin, giving a celibacy talk?
But about the march: I was impressed by the people in the crowd and their apparent determination to make the day a positive experience. Beck, on the other hand, seemed so completely self-absorbed that I was wondering if he was experiencing some sort of crack-up, like the rebel leader in Woody Allen’s “Bananas” who finally gets to address the nation and announces that from now on, everyone has to wear their underwear on the outside.
David Brooks: There, at Saturday’s rally, were the most conservative people in the country, lauding Martin Luther King Jr. There they were, in the midst of their dismay, lavishly celebrating the basic institutions of American government. I have no problem with that.
Gail Collins: Do you think this feel-good moment is a permanent change of course? Most days the Tea Party folk still seem pretty ferocious. Our colleague Kate Zernike has a new book, “Boiling Mad,” which is really required reading for anyone who wants to understand the Tea Party movement. And all paths do seem to lead to mad-as-hell.
David Brooks: If there was a political message to the meeting, it was that many people think America’s peril is fundamentally spiritual, not economic. There has been some straying from the basic values and thrifty, industrious habits that built the country. I don’t agree with much of what this crowd wants, but I do agree with that.

I can’t buy into the idea that the Tea Party is angry because traditional values are being ignored and mocked by the American elite.

Gail Collins: I can’t buy into the idea that the Tea Party is angry because traditional values are being ignored and mocked by the American elite. As elites go, the one today is really pretty low key. I was around for the various rebellions of the sixties and seventies, and if you wanted to see traditional values being made sport of, that was your period. We all told our parents, who were working like mad to put us through college, that it was immoral to devote your life to making money. Nobody has that kind of self-righteousness now.
David Brooks: Obviously, it wasn’t the same as Beck’s show, but at the rally I don’t think the word “elite” was mentioned. There was a sense that the moral failings are in every home and town, and that what is needed is a moral awakening everywhere. After all, the stupid mortgages happened everywhere. The excessive consumption happened everywhere. This was an affirmation of bourgeois values, but against a rot from within, not an assault from on high. Again, at least at the rally.
Gail Collins: Here’s my thought for the day. The Tea Party people say they’re angry about socialism, but maybe they’re really angry about capitalism. If there’s a sense of being looked down upon, it’s that sense of failure that’s built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers. Capitalism is also a system that lives off of change. When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.
David Brooks: I guess I’d put it this way. Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control. The Germans have a Christian Democratic set of institutions, enforced by law. The Swedes have their egalitarianism. Since the days of Jonathan Edwards, we have developed a quasi-religious spirituality that informally restrains the excesses of the market. God and Mammon are intertwined.
Many people feel that the values side of this arrangement is dissolving. Both the government and Wall Street are leaping into the void, to bad effect.

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press People attending the rally on the National Mall on Aug. 28.

Gail Collins: Next time I’m at an ultra-right protest, I’m going to look at the demonstrators and think that what they really need is to be living in Sweden. But the sense of displacement isn’t necessarily all that spiritual. During the last election, I noticed that at the Republican town halls, people complained constantly about immigration. But what they complained most about wasn’t the possibility of lost jobs, or crime. It was that when they called their bank, a recorded message told them to press 2 for Spanish.
David Brooks: Here in D.C., it’s press 1 for English, press 2 for Swedish, and if you press 2 the tax collectors sweep in, take half your income and force you to read those books about the girl with the dragon tattoo. (I liked the first one, but the second one is as slow and lifeless as a Nordic winter.)
People like those at last weekend’s rally want the Judeo-Christian ethic back, which sweetened and softened life on the frontier (physical or technological). And so they march. They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.
It might be possible for a responsible person to tap into this sense, but none has, so Glenn Beck has.
Gail Collins: Somehow you’ve left me with an image of Glenn Beck with a dragon tattoo. I may never forgive you.