Walmart is the new Woodstock and Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman, suggests David Brooks in the New York Times (3/5/10). Clearly, there's a big difference in politics between the '60s hippies and today's tea-partiers. As David writes: "One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Walmart." But David also thinks there are more similarities than differences.

"They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor," he writes. On Amazon dot-com, observes David, the same people who are buying books such as "Liberal Fascism," are also buying "Rules for Radicals," a classic handbook of the New Left. And he thinks that "both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence ... the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Both groups "go in big for conspiracy theories ... and spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted ... have a problem with authority" and have a largely "negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment." However, says David, they have "no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation ... They don't seek to form a counter-establishment because they don't believe in establishments." Both groups, he concludes, "are radically anticonservative," because "conservatives believe in civilization -- in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities."