Noam Chomsky is afraid. Addressing a crowd at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison last April, the Left’s leading intellectual sent out a warning. “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering here.” Chomsky continued, “The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime.” The impetus for the professor’s alarm is the Tea Party, the latest in a long line of right-wing social movements. The emergence of this movement in 2009 rattled the parameters of the American national discourse and shook commentators on the liberal-left into a frenzy. MSNBC ran specials on Timothy McVeigh and right-wing militias, while the Nation columnists like Melissa Harris-Perry invoked the specter of “a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism.” The Tea Party was, from the outset, targeted with invective designed to isolate and marginalize.

This strategy is not surprising. The American left’s response to grassroots activity on the right has historically been punctuated by hysteria, exaggeration, and appeals to the coercive power of the state. This article aims to identify the dominate narratives spun by the liberal-left, as represented by its major intellectual organs and prominent commentators, which have ranged from identifications of a proto-fascist movement animated by the resentments of downwardly mobile white workers to, on the other extreme, apologias for the political activity of a besieged and embittered petit-bourgeoisie. Furthermore, an alternative reading of the Tea Party will be offered, a movement that is not fascistic, racist, nor particularly novel, but rather a new expression of a venerable American right-wing populist tradition. Finally, this essay endeavors to reveal the roots of reigning liberal-left analyses in the historic lack of a national labor party, a particularity that has focused the left’s vitriol onto their opponents on the right rather than the true stakeholders of power.

Read the rest of this essay at the New Politics site.