The Spartan-Satanic-Illuminati Axis of Evil

It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one. 

Thinks James Delingpole in an opinion piece so hysterical it deserves to be mocked more than once.

Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker has an interesting piece on the "intellectual building blocks" of the Tea Party. Media pundit Glenn Beck seems to be the movement's most influential ideologue, punting his idiosyncratic version of history on his Fox news show and via his very own online "Beck University". Beck acknowleges his own intellectual debt to the historical ideas of Robert Welch and Willard Cleon Skousen of the right-wing cold-war-era John Birch Society. The John Birch Society isn't very well known here in Britain, which is a pity, because the belief system concocted by Welch and Skousen is an entertainingly improbable world of fantasy, a sort of Disneyland for paranoids. One of Robert Welch's more interesting notions was that the commie hordes were themselves the mere tools of a far larger, and more ancient, conspiracy:

This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the eighteenth century, in the “uniformly Satanic creed and program” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Run by those he called “the Insiders,” the conspiracy resided chiefly in international families of financiers, such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service, and nongovernmental organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Since the early twentieth century, they had done a good deal of their evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift. “One broad avenue down which these conspiratorial forces advance was known as progressive legislation,” Welch declared in 1966. “The very same collectivist theories and demagogic pretenses which had destroyed earlier civilizations were now paraded forth in the disguise of new and modern concepts.”

Spartans, and Illuminati, and Satanists! Oh, my!

Willard Cleon Skousen brought Welch's conspiracy theories up to date with a few interesting assertions of his own. Franklin Roosevelt's advisor Harry Hopkins, Skousen claimed, had been passing large supplies of uranium to the Soviet Union. He also thought that the Soviets had stolen the plans for the first Sputnik from the USA and that the commies the were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters”. In short, the sort of fantasist who could mistake The Manchurian Candidate for a documentary.

It's hard to find much to smile about Austerity Britain, but the fact that the Brits apparently lack the 'political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks' to take this sort of  hogwash at all seriously is cause for hope and pride.To borrow a phrase, the teabaggers are entitled to their own opinion, but they aren't entitled to their own facts.

Unfortunately, an evidence-based rebuttal of their quirky beliefs seems unlikely to cut much ice with the entrenched Tea Party demographic in the USA. Maybe those conspratorial Spartans had a better idea about how to settle disputes with arrogant blockheads.