Tea Party Has Elites on the Run

Tea Party Has Elites on the Run

When the elites weren't depicting their fellow Americans as out-of-control racists and anti-government zealots, they tried to downplay their social and political importance. They did so with a demographic attempt at marginalization; the tea partiers, they said, were too old, too white, too middle class to matter in contemporary America, and thus could be safely ignored.

This liberal critique of the tea partiers -- a dangerous mob, but of marginal importance in post-racial America -- is a curious paradox. Why fear and loathe a movement said to be narrow in its views and scope?