Jonah, I enjoyed your column today – a nice rebuke to David Brooks’ latest silly unpersuasive thesis. You write:

[Michael] Lind argues that the right has become a “counterculture [that] refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost”… Whereas the Luddites and know-nothings once dropped out for the “Summer of Love,” today’s Luddites and know-nothings have signed up for the “Winter of Hate.”

That’s almost exactly backwards. There was more right-wing “dropping out” in the Nineties, when Dan Rather was warning of “the shadowy right-wing militia movement” and there was a kind of psychological Ruby Ridge siege mentality among a certain sliver of the right: Find a strip of land, live off the grid, stockpile ammunition, raise emus for meat, and keep your eyes peeled. There’s your right-wing counterculture.

A New Hampshire neighbor of mine did this for a while. Then he figured out the ATF guys don’t need to besiege his stockade. What with GPS and so forth, Obama can take him out with an unmanned drone launched from Diego Garcia and no-one would know a thing about it. So he came back down to town and ran for the Select Board as a budget-cutter – and won.

The Tea Party has a certain paradoxical quality – a mass movement of self-reliant individuals, etc. But Brooks and Lind are wrong: It represents a conscious re-engagement, and a rejection of dropping out. That’s why the left is rattled.