“The very strong parallel is the go-for-broke mood,” Gitlin said. The rules of order and civility of language go out the window because “you feel this is a matter of apocalyptic urgency.” Obamacare is not Vietnam, “but for them it is.” The health care law, the main components of which are just being implemented, embodies for the right an abuse of government power verging on tyranny, which justifies the most extravagant response.

The main difference, Gitlin said, “is that Abbie Hoffman never would have run for the Senate. The Tea Party, for all of its complaints, and the Republicans in general have a long history of taking their dissent within the party.”

Indeed, despite the caricatures disseminated by Republicans, the Democratic Party was never taken over by leftist insurgents. With some notable exceptions, the political left of the ’60s, hostile to hierarchy and compromise, spurned the Democratic Party and mainstream politics in general. Leftists of the ’60s migrated instead to single-issue causes, or to Hollywood and academia. The partisans of the right, instead, fought their way to influence at the Republican primary level. The right never got a foothold in the popular culture — it has produced no Bob Dylan or Neil Young, no Ken Kesey or Kurt Vonnegut — but it has become the tail that wags the House of Representatives.

The left scattered after the American withdrawal from Vietnam took away its most galvanizing cause, leaving the Democratic Party ultimately in the hands of Bill Clinton moderates. And, while the success of a ’60s leftist in the New York City mayoral primary has stirred some far-fetched talk of a “new new left,” the national party seems likely to stay closer to the center, where the votes are.

It’s interesting to contemplate what will become of the right’s wacko-birds, as John McCain calls them, after Obamacare is fully implemented and accepted as a popular component of the American safety net. (And even Ted Cruz, in a moment of goofy candor, admitted that that is likely.)

One possibility is that the public tires of them and they go away, disenchanted, perhaps having nudged the Republican Party in some new direction — more populist at home, less interventionist abroad.

My friend Frank Rich, appraising one of the new right’s emerging heroes, Senator Rand Paul, in New York magazine, offered a ’60s analogy. He speculated that Paul might be “kind of a Eugene McCarthy of the right, destined to shake things up without necessarily reaping the rewards for himself.”

McCarthy (for whom I got a haircut and campaigned in 1968) was a bit of a dilettante, who, after failing to get the presidential nomination, dropped out of the Senate at the height of the battle over Vietnam and drifted to the political margins. It’s hard for me to imagine the boundlessly ambitious and shrewd Senator Paul going off to write poetry, or defecting to third-party irrelevance. It seems more likely that he and his cadre stick around, find other hobbyhorses, and continue to drive their own establishment crazy. We’ll check back in 50 years.