The real similarity between the Tea Party and the New Left is a matter of style: a politics of confrontation rather than of compromise. Indeed, our generational tendency toward public melodrama provided the script for the inevitable backlash. The pro-life movement came first, after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973: suddenly it was opponents of abortion who were filling the Mall with placards and protests. Eventually, the Tea Party’s don’t tread on me flag–a brilliant piece of choreography–joined the peace symbol as an icon. The left was never able to elect a President as ideological as Ronald Reagan–though he, too, was a moderate compared with today’s bullyraggers–or to hijack the government, as the Tea Party has, but it was every bit as solipsistic. It was all about street theater, bombast, showtime. “Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic,” William Galston wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “but rather of an empire entering moral senescence.”

I am not saying the baby-boom generation caused the government shutdown, but we’ve presided over an era during which public trust in government has been demolished. We allowed the influence of concentrated money to corrupt our democracy. We allowed the gerrymandering of congressional districts, especially the racial gerrymandering that became legal after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to make it less likely that politicians would run in districts with a centrist majority. We were brilliant at marketing, which plays to our niche differences. All of which conspired to make the political parties ideologically coherent rather than confusing regional coalitions. Those coalitions allowed a system where compromise was easier than confrontation. There would have been no New Deal without Southern Democrats, no Medicare without Northern Republicans.