There is a perception that Tea Partiers are anti or at least non-intellectual.

Another reaction to the Republican cratering has been the Tea Party. The Tea Party is, if nothing else, strongly resistant to the Harvard narrative. Is that where libertarians should be making our overtures? Should we be trying to be TeaPartarians?

The Tea Party poses a problem for libertarians in that the Tea Party is going to stay pretty far to the right on issues like immigration and gay marriage. But the bigger problem is one of social and educational class. The Tea Party does not have a liaison office with the Ph.D crowd. Unfortunately, it seems to me as if libertarian intellectuals would rather deal with Democrats than with the Tea Party because those intellectuals are socially more comfortable with Matt Yglesias than with Glenn Beck.

I think it might be good to have some TeaPartarians, meaning intellectual supporters of free markets who are comfortable working with the Tea Party folks. I worry that an electorally successful Tea Party movement might not have the focus and ideas to take on entitlements and other major contributors to fiscal problems. If the Tea Partiers are electorally successful and all they give us are a few symbolic budget cuts, the long-term trend toward concentrated government power will continue.

My worry is that the Tea Party movement will be satisfied with taking some Democratic scalps and restoring some of the sense of group status that the Tea Party demographic feels that it lost in 2008. Instead, I wish that the Tea Partiers would read the last chapter of Unchecked and Unbalanced and get some ideas from that book. I would like them to be less satisfied with achieving ballot-box validation along with status revenge and instead more interested in reforms that would make government more competitive.

As noted previously, I would like the tea people to remain unsatisfied. Go ahead, take some scalps, get some respect, but stay hungry. If there are to be reforms that improve governance I suspect that they will come from the same old sources that drove us into the current mess because such sources do in fact have the keys to the kingdom. The best that can be done is to motivate them to do better. They will not be replaced.

This will take quite a long time, not just an election cycle or two. We didn't get into this mess quickly and we won't get out soon.

Update: Said another way

In my view, the fundamental mistake that most educated people make is that they favor concentration of political power. Perhaps at one level this is rational--it is possible that the status of intellectuals is higher when political power is more concentrated. But I am more struck by the adverse consequences of concentrated political power and the potential benefits of alternatives. . .

David Brooks writes as if the revolt against the educated class is sui generis. In fact, I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.

This issue for thoughtful analysts isn't whether Tea Partiers are anti-intellectual or not: that's an irrelevant aside. The issue is that the "educated class" is not very well educated and so has made a mess.