The NY Times Tea Party story is certainly very odd. It seems to plunge us into the sociopolitical debates of the 1950s and 1960s, when European exile sociologists like Paul Lazarsfeld attributed not only European fascism but also American movements such as Populism and McCarthyism to manipulation of the ignorant masses, while America historians led by Richard Hofstadter pointed to the "status anxiety" of declining elites as the mainspring of protest and reform. (Alan Wolfe of BC makes this point, in a way, in his comments on the Times website.)

The question of the nature of the Tea Party movement -- broad-based uprising or old white right-wingers complaining about taxes? -- is a real one, so I'm not sure this is approach exactly illegitimate. It would be fine in the New York Review of Books, but on the front page of the New York Times it amounts to burying the lede.