Most voters want a radical change in government but not a radical change in policy. ~David Brooks

May I point out that this doesn’t make any sense? Voters want to change who governs them, but not how they are governed? Other than venting frustration in a futile gesture, what exactly would be the point in doing that? Ever since the bailout in the fall of 2008, there has been mounting frustration with a political class that seems preoccupied with benefiting the most powerful and influential institutions and firms and neglecting most citizens’ interests. The sentiment isn’t strictly opposition to big or even “energetic” government, but there is definitely hostility to collusion between centralized power and concentrated wealth, and so there is hostility to political centralization to the extent that it enables collusion. So there is a desire for major change in policy, but it doesn’t lend itself to easy expression in the idioms available on the right. Meanwhile, this anti-collusion sentiment gets misinterpreted by most as a backlash against government as such, when it is more in the spirit of populist and progressive movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It’s also a fairly low blow to claim that Dinesh D’Souza’s atrocious “anti-colonialist” nonsense has something to do with “the Tea Party style.” As Weigel has pointed out, D’Souza’s horrible arguments about Obama are part of an entire career of horrible D’Souza arguments about a variety of things. Gingrich’s embrace of this nonsense is a function of Gingrich’s enthusiasm for all manner of ignorant demagoguery. Obviously, Beck loves this nonsense and has been pushing it on his show. That’s the only real connection with Tea Partiers, it’s one Brooks doesn’t make, and it would be a case of guilt by association if he did.

P.S. While I’m on the subject, I should add that George Neumayr makes a similarly ridiculous “neocolonialist” charge against Obama in a recent article for American Spectator. This argument that Obama’s anthropologist mother made him what he is today overlooks the small problem that Obama spent most of his youth apart from his mother, and it remains as silly as it was when David Goldman/Spengler made it two years ago.