The Beat Generation and the Tea Party Movement

They don't have anything in common, right? Think again.

From a story in the New York Times...

In other words, the spirit of Beat dissent is alive (though some might say not well) in the character of Tea Party protest. Like the Beats, the Tea Partiers are driven by that maddeningly contradictory principle, subject to countless interpretations, at the heart of all American protest movements: individual freedom. The shared DNA of American dissent might be one answer to the question of why the Tea Partiers, so extreme and even anachronistic in their opposition to any type of government, exert such an astounding appeal.

Of course, on the surface the differences between “Beat” and “Tea Party” are so immense as to make comparisons seem frivolous. The Beats, though pacifist, were essentially apolitical. (Kerouac’s hatred of the left at the end of his life seemed most of all to be a revulsion against the New Left’s enthusiastic hating.) Their aims were spiritual and sexual liberation, and a unifying wholeness with nature. Insofar as they had sociopolitical ambitions, their goals — abolishing censorship, protecting the environment, opposing what Ginsberg called “the military-­industrial machine civilization” — were the stuff of poetry, not organized politics. In contrast, the Tea Partiers seek the political objectives of “individual liberty, limited government and economic freedom.” Balancing the budget and rejecting cap and trade are their hearts’ desires, not sexual revolution or the quest for spiritual harmony through the use of Zen meditation and hallucinogenics.

Still, American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking, suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on the political spectrum dissent takes place. Surely just about every Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the liberal media: “Are you going to let our emotional life,” he once wrote, “be run by Time magazine?”