Rightwing Tea Party types are not cool, but there are an awful lot of them out there and their rivals have ceded the stage to them - This weekend, the fledgling Tea Party movement has been holding a convention in Nashville, Tennessee. White, middle-class, contemptuous of Wall Street, Washington and academia, the Tea Party insurgents view themselves as the descendants of the militiamen who whipped the British at Yorktown. Ironically, with the exception of George Washington, most of the firebrands of the revolution were intellectuals: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, John Jay, John Adams, James Madison, Samuel Adams. Only Paul ­Revere worked in retail.

The Tea Party insurgents have had a nice run recently, disrupting public hearings, shouting down elected officials, scaring the bejesus out of incumbents. They insist they are amateurs, that their movement is spontaneous, though critics suggest otherwise, insisting they are funded by those who wish to see Barack Obama fail. The Tea Partyers despise Obama, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, and are fiercely opposed to the government bailout of Wall Street. They hate taxes, the stimulus package, the media and Hollywood, and believe they are the last remaining bulwark of democracy, preventing the US from slipping into socialism. They have put anyone running for re-election on notice that if they fail to toe the Tea Party line, they will walk the plank. Full Piece