The Tea Party and Barry Goldwater

Roy Grosser, Las Vegas

Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013 | 2:02 a.m.

Nick Kristof’s Oct. 6 column, “Excuses, excuses, excuses,” takes the Tea Party to task for defying logic in the government shutdown. Whether you agree with him or not, his arguments are hard to dismiss out of hand.

I see the Tea Party faction as a throwback to the Barry Goldwater crowd of the 1960s: People infuriated by the complexity of life in a modern industrial state and determined to wreck the machinery designed to deal with that complexity.

Righty Radio is fond of branding Democrats as the “low-information” voters. I agree low-information voters are legion, but I doubt they are all Dems.

If illogical thinking is the decider, think of these head scratchers: Tea Party folk hate the Wall Street fat cats and lobbyists so much they want to cut their taxes.

They say Obamacare will reveal a shortage of physicians — an argument for health reform, not against it.

It’s a case of a highly ideological faction convinced that America’s progress is a result of rigid stands on principle. The opposite view would be that pragmatism has led to our most envied accomplishments — what works, what’s logical. Most Americans have the latter view.