New Deal Rising?

If the Left Had a Tea Party… (David Sirota) from Politico Magazine 
"Dan Cantor and the making of a liberal uprising. ... Cantor had been trying both to maximize his party’s new power in New York and to use that success to forge a national opportunity. His goal, he told me, is nothing less than a resurrection of the powerful progressive coalition that shaped the New Deal era."
RANT ALERT: It seems to be the day for kicking the legacy of the baby boom generation.  In my view, the left HAD a Tea Party -- multiple Tea Parties back in the late 1960s and thru most of the 1970s.  So many on the far left of the time (think much of what came out of the "New Left" and the political activists who came out of the Hippies) were either egregious amateurs with good causes -- or nut cases in pursuit of idiotic causes.  Such could easily be said about the Tea Party now.  Was Abbey Hoffman really any less nutty or offensive than Sharon Angle or Sheriff Joe Arpaio?  The era was rife with so many out-to-lunch lefties, folks that had no use for organized labor or the white working class generally -- and, for reasons that are still unclear to me, the Dems seemed to draw these people like flies.  It would take 20+ years for the Democrats to largely rid themselves of these loony tunes.  Did some good come from these diverse groups?  Sure -- the modern environmental movement was a huge beneficiary of their activism -- but their cultural and generational cluelessness needlessly alienated millions of people who ran from the Democratic Party in droves.  Fortunately, I feel confident it will take just as long if not longer for the current GOP to shake loose from the extremists that now populate their party.