It’s amazing to me how quickly the tea party business dropped almost completely off the radar screen.

Even the day of, Drudge wasn’t promoting it very heavily - lead item, for sure, but demurely so, particularly by Drudge’s “blaring siren” standards. And I was struck by the almost glum tone of some of my right-wing correspondents yesterday who - when I started making fun of the teabagging - didn’t bother to argue that it was too a significant turnout.

What they said instead was, oh, so you’ve got a problem with people who exercise their lawful right to protest?

Not in the least.

Bottom line, my issue with the tea parties was - what exactly were they protesting?

If I thought they were legitimately about protesting government bailouts to AIG and Goldman Sachs and the degree to which an overgrown financial industry has virtually captured the reins of government - I would have been at the protests. But with the exception of some among the Ron Paul/Libertarian faction, that’s not what the protests were about.

Rather, they seemed to be what Sullivan called “tea tantrums.” These were people who showed up simply becausee they were angry that they lost an election, and are now marginalized. “We surround them,” said Glenn Beck, but Beck is wrong (and he knows it) - conservatives, those who (as we said in the vid) cut their teeth on Ronald Reagan, first got OUTRAGED during the Clinton era, voted for Bush twice, guffaw at Rush and Coulter and Hannity and the rest - it is now they who are surrounded. They feel, they perceive, they know that it is the end of the line.

Wednesday, then, was all about raging at the dying of the light.

Word is they’re going to do it again July 4. Go for it. Make good use of your American right to assemble and protest. But in the end, it will have about as much effect on actual American policy as those (far larger) anti-war protests did back in 2002 and 2003. Which is to say: zero.

The conservative movement is old, a spent political force. It does not appeal to a younger generation of voters, and the bitter enders refuse to alter their principles in any way that might attract younger voters. There is no looking forward, it’s all pining for Reagan. Talk-show hosts are the obvious and undisputed leaders of the remnants of the once-powerul coalition. Poll after poll shows a growing number of Americans have a low and falling opinion of the Republican Party. Wednesday’s protests did absolutely nothing to counter that - and might have hastened it.

We are witnessing the end.

There’s a new conservatism out there, waiting to be born after this one finally dies. It’s why I read Larison and a few others. Larison notes, quite correctly, that “mainstream conservatives have become more and more irrelevant to current debates over the last few years” (indeed, it is also this that the tea partiers raged against):

They prefer to operate in their own universe where the “surge” has solved everything in Iraq, bankrupt petro-states threaten to dominate the world, and Jimmy Carter somehow created the housing bubble.  …

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For my part, this is why I am much more interesed in talking to and engaging with heterodox, meliorist conservatives who tend to break with the movement in other ways, because at least they are interested in ideas and policy discussions, which seem to be incidental at best in mainstream conservative discourse nowadays.

But the likes of Larison, of course, get called “leftist,” or worse. Hell, when one of Hannity’s guests, Bernard frickin’ Goldberg, tells him that “we have to stop going out of our way to find fault with every single thing he does” - he too is talking to the wall.

We make fun of the OUTRAGE because we are tired of the outrage. The outrage is all there is, and it got old years ago. Now it becomes something, merely, to be lampooned.

And the hell of it is, there’s probably more to be outraged about than ever before. But it involves AIG rather than welfare recipients; it involves the hegemony of the financial industry and how this has unduly influenced government policy rather than illegal immigration.

I’ve no doubt the new, eventual right will address these issues, for it must. The battle lines are shifting. Tuesday’s protests represented an attempt by the right to hold a position that has already been overrun. It didn’t work. And it won’t in July, either.