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The Tea Party is Nothing New Under the Sun

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Rick Perlstein’s piece about how the Tea Party is just the latest in a long series of similar reactionary insurgencies is outstanding. The follow-up also makes a crucial point:

The fact of the matter is that the relationship between business and the modern right has never been simple—and yet, despite some stutter steps backward, it has always advanced in the exact same basic direction: toward romance.

I do have one quibble with the first piece:

One mistake of the establishments past and present has been to fail to take seriously the apocalypticism of conservative insurgencies: They couldn’t possibly mean it, could they? So the policy wizards in the Obama White House build a Rube Goldberg healthcare law that relies on states to expand Medicaid and create healthcare exchanges, and then are utterly blindsided when red-state legislatures and governors decline. Haven’t they heard the news that conservatives don’t like it when people benefit from government? Likewise, the White House offered up cuts to government programs popular with both the left (social programs) and right (the military) in the last round of budget negotiations, confident that Republicans would never let the sequester actually come to pass—blindsided again.

The point about the sequester is fair. But I don’t think the Medicaid argument is. After all, the Affordable Care Act correctly anticipated the problem of states rejecting Medicaid money and constructed a mechanism that would make it much more difficult for states to reject the money. I don’t see how Obama/Reid/Pelosi can be blamed for the Supreme Court’s completely unexpected decision to throw that mechanism out.

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