How about Some Left Wing Populism to Fight the Tea Party--and Stephen Harper Too.

The New York Times had a disturbing story on Tuesday about the rise of Tea Party radicals in what the French would call l'Amérique profonde. It focuses on groups forming in Eastern Washington state and Idaho--Sarah Palin's original stomping grounds--where concern over real problems like unemployment is driving people to a kind of anarchic, mystic Right.

The story is scary for two reasons. The first is that it seems that none of the Tea Partiers see any solutions for their problems on the left. The Obama Democrats are viewed as the establishment that got the US into the current economic mess, and all government is considered suspect. All of the interesting suggestions that liberals like Paul Krugman have put foward are discounted, but few in the Democratic party are raising their voices to champion them, anyway. This bodes very ill for the country.

The second is the tone of the story. It ends with this nice, retired woman talking about stock piling food and ammunition for a possible civil war. But the story does not succeed in giving any objective measure of the size of this movement. To be sure the Tea Party did well in the Massachusetts senatorial race, but was that because the Democrats didn't work hard enough, or because they didn't offer a clear enough, left wing solution to problems? And how much of this is disguised racism and mistrust of financiers who are all supposed to be Jewish? Is the Tea Party tapping into the Right Wing fantacism that has long been rampant in places like Eastern Washington? (And in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit my extended family living in that part of the world includes several people who I'm sure have never been convinced that the Protocols of Zion are a fraud.)

If anything, it seems to me time for people who care about civil society in the US to stand up and organize themselves, by offering a left wing brand of populism. There were elements of that in the campaign Obama so successfully ran for the presidency. Why abandon the methods and the causes now?

And, memo to progressives in Canada: don't go right to fight Stephen Harper. Stand up and be counted for what's great about this country, which is basically small L liberal and social democratic values.