Maybe neither race nor "another type of conflict"?

"No, It’s Not About Race," writes David Brooks in today's New York Times about the recent demonstration in Washington against the Obama administration:

I was [at the Capitol] last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government "tea party" protesters...I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with [some] mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands....
    ...These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum...Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them....

    I'm not sure that Mr. Brooks's inability to discern any tension settles the matter. I've noticed that people often instinctively make nice when they come face to face with particular persons from groups they feel negatively towards. But be that as it may, Brooks writes that "It's not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old...for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers" [emphasis mine]:

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates...to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates...to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

There could be something to this; David Brooks has a way of seemingly effortlessly making a reasonable case. But I'm not sure it's all about either racism or populism, as Brooks's otherwise thoughtful piece seems to assume. Racism and populism are only two available possibilities, if attractive ones for writers to embroider (as Brooks has just done with populism and as Maureen Dowd did recently with racism, in "Boy, Oh, Boy").
    But any particular protest will likely have more immediate provocation: a perceived threat to one's tax bill, one's small business, one's access to health care, one's safety on the streets or in one's home, and so on.
    Of course, if someone is a racist or perceives "the educated class" as some sort of elitist enemy, then the person's feelings about that could modulate the specific threat into a racist or populist key. And I grant that the racist and populist strains are ripe for exploitation by the Rush Limbaughs and Lou Dobbses of the world—and by our political parties.
    To tease out just what motivated the recent protesters at the Capitol, I wonder whether, with adequate preparation, it might have been possible for a statistically significant sample of the "tea party" protesters to be surveyed soon after the event with a carefully designed set of questions. The resulting op-ed column might have been as good a read as David Brooks's and probably more informative.