"a manifesto whose anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner."
Which just proves again that no one wants to really listen to white middle class rage, despite the right's patronizing of it and the liberal's condescension to it. In the very note Frank Rich says he read, Stack wrote right at the very bottom:
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
It's a pithy if accidental riposte to the sucker mentality of the tea baggers, to their "gullibility." Stack was a good deal more sophisticated then the tea baggers he's being lumped in with: he understood taxation as being built into the capitalist system, whereas tea baggers in the main understand taxation as essentially hostile to capitalism, a system they define as private enterprise and nothing else. Stack went to his death with a real structural analysis raging in his head; the tea baggers toss around conspiracy theories against capitalism without understanding them and often without truly believing them.
So why did the tea baggers post a memorial to Stack on their twitter page, and why did Republican Rep. Steve King exploit his murder-suicide for votes by promising to shut down the I.R.S.? It isn't because of their shared politics- the tea bagger types just recognize Stack's anger as they're own. Their solidarity goes deeper than politics. It's charitable to say that the tea baggers even have politics- they have no idea what capitalism is, as evidenced by King's promise to end a capitalist fixture like the I.R.S., and they have few tactics beyond making signs and chanting slogans - but their grievances are real and are often directed at real problems. They may not know politics, but they know anger, and in that regard they saw Stack as a true believer and shanghaied him into their group.
Rich writes that Stack's kamikaze attack may "prove the most significant (political) event of February 2010," as if Stack's lone gunmen-style sabotage of an offensive structure is a new event in America, a watershed. But from school shootings to office shootings, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Granby, Colorado bulldozer rampage, both government and "purely capitalist" institutions have been attacked in this country by lonely middle-class people acting alone with idiosyncratic ideologies, which borrow ideas from the left and the right or are apolitical. Stack's anger is pervasive throughout the land, and the tea baggers are a symptom of it- not the other way around. But politics remains politics, and each political camp will reflexively try to compartmentalize and contain Stack's fury within a left-right dichotomy, rather then try to more effectively and peacefully channel that rage through actual left or even right politics.
I think that the politics of lone vengeance ultimately serves the right, and these attacks do tend to gravitate right-ward. The right thrives off the spectacle of an angry society divided into cells whose movements can be explained by conspiracy theories, while the left requires social organization that involves and serves the needs of a real community. It's possible Stack is an ideologue of the "Third Way," a rejectionist of both capitalism and socialism; those people certainly tend to gravitate right-ward. But lumping him in with the tea baggers is dismissive and ignores the root of the problem.
The real reason Stack's so anathema to the left while the right is now tentatively and sometimes explicitly embracing him is that the right is the only extant means of transferring white middle class anger into political anger. It's not just that the right is getting angrier, as Rich writes in his article. It's the country that is getting angrier, or at least its faltering middle class segment is, and segments of the right are in the position to move with it.
It's about rage. Ninety-nine percent of the time it just smolders, sometimes it mills around cattle-like in DC in the form of the tea parties, and sometimes it flies planes into buildings.
