Considering the Tea Party crowd, I wonder: Is an effective national political coalition of the Right still possible? The old Fusionism articulated by National Review produced a broadly unified Right in part because it was a reaction to a deeply unified Left characterized by Communism abroad and by streams of leftist thought in Europe and the United States that were to various extents sympathetic with Marxist analysis and revolutionary hostility toward tradition, church, family, and — above all — capitalism. Today’s Left isn’t really much like the Left to which Fusionism was a response: It retains the hostility toward church and tradition, but its hostility is adolescent, not revolutionary. Comfortably embedded in the managerial class, progressives have made their peace with the organs and fruits of capitalism, if not its philosophy. There was an element of class warfare in the Obama movement, but it wasn’t an uprising of the proletariat — it was the grad-schooled upper-middle-class’s imposition of its values on the rest of society. Governor Palin wasn’t denounced as an enemy of the people, but as a hick. That’s a different kind of thing to oppose and to manage, especially for a conservative movement that has its own share of grad-schooled upper-middle-class allegiances. I wonder how many conservative columnists and wonks are truly comfortable in a crowd of people chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Unless I am at Mass, I am uncomfortable in crowds of chanting people, even when they’re chanting slogans I endorse. Rush Limbaugh is the master articulator of populist conservatism, with no trace of snobbery in him, but it is difficult to picture him chanting.

I believe the Tea Party movement is a healthy and worthwhile development. But is it conservative? It is good for the people to sometimes shake their fists at The Man, and The Man should take it seriously. Politics necessitates compromise, but I wonder if the people at the Tea Party want the same things, or want enough of the same things to cohere, and to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative. And if they do want enough of the same things, I wonder what those things are — because I was there, and I am not sure.