David Brooks hung around Glenn Beck’s National Ignorance Pride gathering on 9/12 long enough to assure himself that the teabaggers couldn’t possibly be as racist as many of their signs and statements revealed. No, it’s not about race, he declares.

The proof, he tells us, is that there was also a small group of African-Americans holding a different event at the same time, and white folks gladly purchased food from their lunch stands and paid good money, without actually burning them down or lynching them. Of course, the lunch stand folks probably had the good sense not to say they, too, hoped to be President one day.

Assured on that point, Brooks then gives us an essay explaining the protesters are the logical and direct descendants of . . . Jeffersonian democrats. They’re just good folks steeped in the populism of defending personal freedom in the face of threatened government tyranny.

I always thought that Jefferson’s democracy was dominated by highly educated, propertied land owners, some of whom owned slaves and fathered children by them, who jealously guarded their right to limit the franchise and keep a monarch from interfering with their privileged status.

That may seem a bit harsh, but times have changed, David. Never in his worst nightmares would Jefferson have imagined huge mega-corporations dominating commerce, defining and limiting our choices, dictating near-monopoly prices, stifling regulation and using government to help them loot the national treasury and people’s pockets. What would he think now?

Given where we are, today’s Jeffersonians would be demonstrating against the corporations and asking government to hold them in check. To the extent they focused their anger on government, it would be to shame their elected officials into breaking their dependence on corporate bribery as the means to advancing their careers.

People concerned about individual values would be demanding that government stop helping the corporations screw the common man. And yet not one sign or statement from the 9/12 crowd even remotely suggested they shared that view or grapsed what was going on and why.

It’s simply ludicrous to think the real descendants of Jeffersonian democracy would be equating the President with monkeys and Hitler, calling him a socialist, a fascist, a czar, and illegitimate merely because he tried to put people back to work and reenergize business with an economic stimulus, or because he thought uninsured people might need government help to buy insurance from the private insurance market. Nor, given the concentration of wealth and the dominance of impersonal corporations, would those descendants be demanding that government do nothing to restrain corporate behavior.

The only consolation we have left is that there probably aren’t more than three attendees, all elected officials, at Beck’s celebration of ignorance who even know who David Brooks is. The rest would not have a clue what he was talking about. I’m with them on that last point.

Update — On point and too good not to steal, from Charles Pierce:

Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people’s lives–so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on. Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen a spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far beyond even the limits of Irish Smartass to describe it.