Is the Tea Party Really a New Phenomenon?

Image from source, Mother Jones

Wednesday on The Randi Rhodes Show, the host mentioned a group that was opposed to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It had a vague resonance with me, probably from a decades-ago American History class. The American Liberty League was a group of rabble-rousers who did everything they could to halt the progress of a liberal agenda, which was attempting to pull us out of an economic disaster. Sound familiar?  As Randi says, there is nothing new under the sun.

[Excerpt]

Tea Party: Old Whine in New Bottles

IN A WIDELY READ essay about the tea party movement published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, historian Mark Lilla provided a now-familiar explanation about what motivates the tea partiers. They are, he reckoned, angry about the recession; angry about health care reform; angry about President Obama; and angry about educated elites forever telling them what to do. "A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes," he said, and he described the movement this way. . .

Read more at: Mother Jones