Tea Party -- Contents

The Story of the Tea Party

1. Tea Parties: Astroturf or Sown by the Wind?
   
   
2. It's Obama's Budget Now
   
   
3. How Big Could It Get?
   
   
4. "Gentry Liberals" Dominate Dems
   
   
5. Don't Worry About NY-23
   
   
6. CNN's Conventional Wisdom on Palin
   
   
7. Next Up: Tea Party Convention
   
   
8. Bleeding Health Care?
   
   
9. Conservative Women Pols: For Real?
   
   
10. Obama's Grass Roots
    
    
11. Roiling Political Currents
    
    
12. Dems to Link GOP to Palin and Tea Party
    
    
13. Obama's Tame Professor
    
    
14. MA Voters Send Obama an Anniversary Present
    
    
15. Broder Spills Beans on Palin
    
    
16. Confucius and the Community Organizer
    
    
17. The Trouble with Specifics
    
    
18. By-the-numbers Conservatism
    
    
19. Give David Brooks a Break
    
    
20. Tea Party Not Radical Enough
    
    
21. Rush as Svengali?
    
    
22. Tea Party: First Blood
    
    
23. Young Turk Doesn't Get It
    
    
24. Palin Trumps Race Card
    
    
25. Liberals Conspire to Play Race Card
    
    
26. It's Conservative Nostalgia Time Again
    
    
27. I Just Got a Tingle!
    
    
28. Our Friendship vs. Their Resentment
    
    
29. Republicans Eating Their Own?
    
    
30. Moving the Dial
    
    
31. No Compromise, Says Rush
    
    
32. Reality 101 for Nov 3, 2010
    
    
33. He's Out of Ammo; She's Loaded for Bear
    
    
34. Tying Trump, Berlusconi, UKIP, Le Pen Together
    

Tying Trump, Berlusconi, UKIP, Le Pen Together

On the view of Reihan Salam of National Review, Donald Trump is just one of a number of protest candidates and parties that have been emerging in recent years in western democracies (H/T PowerLine). Here's the money quote in "Why Donald Trump Isn't Going Away" in Slate.

Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state.

Or this:

The Danish People’s Party went from the far-right fringe to become Denmark’s second-largest party by combining anti-immigration sentiment with a commitment to protecting social programs that serve native Danes. 

See what is going on here? The electorates of the western democracies were promised cradle-to-grave social benefits forever. That's what they thought was the deal. But really, the educated Ruling Class had other ideas, because no ruling class wants to just sit there a manage Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid for the rest of time. So we had to have green energy; we had to have gay marriage; we had to have immigration; we had to have sanctuary cities.

The electorate of the western democracies look at all this and they see the shaking of the foundations.

Now the right thing for the electorate to do would be to say: take your social benefits and shove it. Take your immigration and shove it. Take your everything else and shove it. We are a free people, you and I.

But they can't. They can't give up on the benefits. And why should they? They've paid those swingeing taxes on labor all their working lives. Why should they give it all up when they paid their dues?

The Trumps and the Berlcusconis and the Farages and the Le Pens are all saying that you can keep your benefits and dump immigration and dump political correctness too.

But they are lying. The problem is not immigration. It is not even political correctness. The problem is the benefit state. Unless you reform that and contract the size of the state then you haven't started to solve anything.

The telling point is Britain's UKIP and its drift towards "largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state." UKIP understands that it doesn't get to compete as a major party unless it promises to keep the benefit checks coming.

Back in 2010 our liberal friends were wont to sneer at the Tea Party. The Tea Partiers were talking a big line about limited government and the Constitution, they said, but it was still "hands off my benefits." They were right to sneer. Reform of the current mess begins and ends with the shrinking of the benefit state.

Instead we have Hillary Clinton promising to solve the problem of student debt by increasing government spending and regulation on higher education to make higher education more "affordable."

The Trump phenomenon shows that people are all exercised that "something is wrong." But the people are still a country mile away from doing anything about it.

The market economy is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you must adjust yourself to the market every day if you want to prosper. There is no free lunch and no place to hide, but the market economy delivers prosperity and a rough sort of justice for those that submit to its hegemony.

The government is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you capture political power and promise yourself and your supporters perpetual pensions that continue forever without regard to the economic facts on the ground. Free lunches all round, and don't worry about the future! It ends like Greece and Argentina, or even Venezuela.

Every day each of us makes the choice, whether to serve our fellow humans and hope for a reward, or vote for a politician that offers free stuff. Most of us, most of the time, choose the latter.

We all will, of course, get exactly what we deserve.

He's Out of Ammo; She's Loaded for Bear

If you want to know how much trouble President Obama is in, look no further than his federal pay freeze. It's a gimmick, and it shows that he's out of ammo. The glorious days of 2009 when liberals seemed to be converting liberal shibboleths into government programs at a rate of a billion dollars an hour are over. All he's left with is a symbolic pay freeze and doing a deal on the Bush tax cut extension.

According to Rich Galen, the deal is tax cuts extension for unemployment benefit extension. That is not so good for Democrats because, compassionate though it may be, extending unemployment benefits will delay the return of the unemployed back into the labor force. That will delay the recovery. That will lower the chances for President Obama to get reelected. (On the other hand, the equity markets are up two percent today).

Then there is Sarah Palin. She's got another book out, America by Heart, and she's loaded for bear. I notice in her new book that she has stopped calling herself a commonsense conservative. "Commonsense Conservatism" was the line in her first book, Going Rogue. In the last chapter of her new book she calls for "Commonsense Constitutional Conservatism." Well now. What would that be all about do you think? I will tell you.

Sarah Palin is not the clueless trailer trash that our liberal friends want her to be. Instead she is a skilled elected politician who has done it the hard way, working up from city council to mayor to governor without friends in powerful places. She understands that it no longer enough to be a commonsense conservative. Not after two years of the Tea Party.

Palin understands that the fulcrum of the Tea Party movement is not specific issues but the general demand that we return to the concept of limited government, a government of laws rather than a government of programs.

How do you get limited government? You start with a constitution and a people that believe in it. For the last century, beginning with Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, our liberal friends have advanced the idea of a "living constitution" that could be adapted to the times. The real meaning is, of course, that the constitution could be changed on the fly rather than the laborious process of constitutional amendment.

Notice that the "living constitution" theory means that the government can do anything. It reduces government to a pure contest of power. One year the government may change the constitution as the behest of the popular will, another year the government may change the constitution at the behest of the educated elite.

The result is what we have today. It is a government that can't say no, a government that has promised pensions and benefits to the people that can never be delivered and will result in a train wreck at some point. After the train wreck the liberal clients will find that the promises are worth nothing.

But now the people, through the medium of the Tea Party movement, are telling the progressive elite that they demand a return to constitutional government, a limited government not a living government.

Sarah Palin is one street-smart politician. And that is why she is now a "commonsense constitutional conservative."

Reality 101 for Nov 3, 2010

Politics is always an argument about "reality," in the modern sense of the approved point of view. Let's get one thing clear, writes Timothy Dalrymple. The Tea Party isn't brand new, whatever liberals say.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before: “If the Tea Party activists were really upset about spending, where were they when Bush was running up the deficits?” The alleged inconsistency -- that conservatives were perfectly content with big government under Bush but are outraged now -- is a key component of the liberal argument that the Tea Party is actually driven by more nefarious motives.

Plenty of conservatives were unhappy with Bush's spending. But nobody gave them no never-mind. But we reality-based chaps are going to have to hammer this out, again and again. Because liberals will do anything rather than admit that the tide had turned and that they must now take a back seat in the political bus.

My version of reality aligns with Dalrymple.

Back in the 1990s under the Gingrich Congress, spending was not cut, but the rate of increase was sharply decreased. The result was a small federal budget surplus in 1998. But then the political tide changed. People started to think: wow, things are getting better. Maybe now it was time to open the spending spigots a little and do the things we couldn't do when the deficit was threatening to eat us alive. So when George W. Bush ran he ran as a "compassionate conservative," and supported big-government initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Medicare drugs. Conservatives hated this, and I hated it too, although I understood that any Republican would have to run like that. The stern budget-balancing politics of the early 1990s had run its course.

When the Democrats ran in 2006 and 2008 they ran as budget balancers. Nancy Pelosi vowed "no new deficit spending" in 2007.

So nobody can really be surprised that a conservative anti-spending movement got started in 2009 the moment that it became clear that the Obama administration was not going to balance the budget but simply open the spigots wide and pump money as fast as possible into the buckets of every liberal interest group in the nation.

Now, of course, we have the mother of all debt problems and the mother of all spending problems and the real problem of an economy that isn't expanding rapidly after the meltdown of 2008. Americans are frightened about big government spending like they have never been frightened in the past and they are right to be afraid.

The question is: what comes next. Do we really do something about spending, which means entitlements, or do we fudge one more time?

That is the point of this election and the election that comes after it.

It is a battle for the hearts and minds of women and minorities. White men have been persuaded about the follies of big government for some time. No surprise there. White men are the people expected to pay for a big government that counts women and minorities as its darlings.

There comes a time in the trajectory of every minority when it ceases to respond to the tune of big government and its patronage. It says I don't need the political machine to protect me from the big bad world any more.

This truth is the great truth of the modern city and the modern economy. The modern world is not a world of robber barons, whatever left-wing writers say. It is a world that has the least amount of robber barons in history. All you need to get along is to pay a little attention in school and get yourself a skill and learn to be trustworthy. Then you will thrive.

All we need to do in the years ahead is to unwind slowly all the entitlements and special privileges created in the century of big government. If we can do that America will thrive. If we don't unwind all those privileges then government will default on its debt and the weak and the poor will go to the wall.

No Compromise, Says Rush

Rush Limbaugh told the Republican elite in no uncertain terms yesterday that compromise with President Obama is not the solution.

Apparently the top Republicans are telling major donors that they will work with President Obama for a decent compromise on their differences.

Rush says: No! If top Republicans compromise on principles they will create a third party. 2010 is not 1994, says Rush:

In 1994, Americans were not out of work. Their government wasn't bankrupt. The health care system was not being dismantled... Americans were not flooding town hall meetings... There was no Tea Party movement back then. There weren't a whole lot of political protest rallies numbering in the millions. They had not produced an organic grassroots movement like the Tea Party that could, if double-crossed, create a conservative political party that would bring an abrupt end to the GOP. That was not possible in 1994.

Quite so. But I'd say that it all depends on the results on November 2. If there's a 55 seat GOP gain then we are talking compromise. If there's an 80 seat gain then we are talking major pushback. If we get to a 100 seat gain, then it is: "Mr President, the people have spoken, and they will not be denied. I'd like to compromise with you but the people demand change. Real change. They are saying: Cut the spending, cut the debt, end the bailouts. And that is what we, as the servants of the people, must do.

There's a nice little commentary on the situation here by Frank J. Fleming. You could call it a conversation about suckonomics.

AMERICANS: “So, the economy is pretty bad and there’s high employment. You think you can do something about that?”

DEMOCRATS AND OBAMA: “We can spend a trillion dollars we don’t have on pork and stuff.”

AMERICANS: “No … that’s not what we want. We’d really like you not to do that.”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re stupid. We’re doing it anyway.”

AMERICANS: “That’s not going to help us get jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “Sure it will; millions of them … though they may be invisible. You’ll have to trust us they exist. And guess what else we’ll do: We’ll create a giant new government program to take over health care.”

AMERICANS: “That has nothing to do with jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “We don’t care about that anymore. We really want a giant new health care program. We’re sure you’ll love it.”

AMERICANS: “Don’t pass that bill. You hear me? Absolutely do not pass that bill.”

DEMOCRATS: “Believe me; you’ll love it. It has … well, I don’t know what exactly is in the bill, but we’re sure it’s great.”

AMERICANS: “Listen to me: DO. NOT. PASS. THAT. BILL.”

When you completely ignore the American people it really sucks. And the American people have to do something about it, something that will stick in the minds of politicians for a generation or more.

The only question is, how large a GOP gain in the House will it take to get the attention of the Ruling Class?

I'd say the threshold is somewhere in the range of 80 seats.

Moving the Dial

Everyone tells the Republicans that they need to do something to appeal to women and minorities.

But how? There are two ways. You can do it by moving towards them. Or you can move them towards you.

Practical politics, we can assert, is a combination of the two.

The problem is that, until you've done it, the task seems unsurmountable. Take Latinos and blacks.

For Latinos, we are told, the big issue is immigration, and why not. All recent immigrants to the United States want to bring the rest of their family over. But for Republicans, that desire runs up against the fact that we can't just open the gates and let everyone in, and we can't just issue a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. So how do Republicans reach out?

For blacks, the big issue seems to be racism, that behind every white face hides a southern sheriff. And blacks are heavily invested into patronage politics like affirmative action. Republicans are voters that don't like patronage politics.

Recent history tells us that people become Republicans when they stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans. Yet a century ago, William McKinley won the 1896 election with a Republican coalition of business, labor and urban immigrants against a Democratic coalition dominated by rural, religious, easy money voters. Where did the hyphens go then?

For the last ten years, the Republican Party has been the party of economic conservatives, the religious, the married, the male, the white and the private sector. The Democrats have been the party of women and minorities, the educated elite, crony capitalists, the single, the secular, the moderate, and the young.

Now things are changing. Writes Matthew Continetti, in an article about Sarah Palin:

Over the past two years, Pew and Gallup surveys have tracked the public as it has moved to the right -- not on just one or two issues but on a whole constellation of them. Even on the controversial topics of abortion, guns and same-sex marriage, Palin is not as far away from the center as some suppose. A May 2009 Gallup poll, for example, found that a majority of Americans identified as "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice." In October 2009, Gallup measured record-low support for gun control. The public is divided on same-sex marriage, with about half the country joining Palin's (and Obama's) opposition.

The fact is that political parties are not like armies, directed from the top. They are shifting coalitions of voters, and they respond to changes in the political weather without quite knowing what is going on. The Tea Party movement seemed to come out of the blue and seems to be directed at least in part by a lot of conservative women. Where did they come from? To what extent is the Tea Party influenced by the Koch brothers and Dick Armey? Who knows?

What we do know is that the dial is moving. More people are persuaded by the conservative agenda than two or four years ago. Probably they are not persuaded by conservative ideas so much as frightened by President Obama's ideas and the clear feeling that things aren't working like they used to.

What we can be sure of is that the party alignments of 2100 will be different from the party alignment of 2010, just as the party alignments of 2010 bear no resemblance to the party alignments of 1896.

And anyone that tells you how to move the dial ought to know better. Sometimes you can move the dial; sometimes the dial moves itself. Sometimes the dial even moves you!

Republicans Eating Their Own?

This week we are back to the old meme: Republicans eating their own.

How come this only happens to Republicans, the usual suspects whine?

The answer is that the Republican Party is a different animal from the Democratic Party. And as I look around the blogosphere this morning I see that everyone agrees with me. Roger Kimball gets it, almost:

That’s the thing that scares people about the tea party. It operates outside the jurisdiction set down by the other parties, be they Democratic or Republican. All those sources of patronage, wells of political preferment, reservoirs of prestige, perquisites, and power: That’s what politics as usual is about. It has built up an impressive institutional structure.

That's OK as far as it goes. But here is commenter ZenPundit on a ChicagoBoyz blog about NPR's difficulty in understanding the Tea Party.

First, a majority of the Left are still in the “community organizer”, Alinskyist, protest theater, organizational front group, grievance-victim-social-justice paradigm adhered to and honed since the 1930’s by the Marxists, Social Democrats, organized labor and the New Left. They want a centralized nanny-state themed to race and gender issues and approach politics with a vanguard mindset where talking points are issued by the leaders and everyone must stay in lockstep.

We need to understand that the Republican Party, though it certainly deals in "wells of political preferment, reservoirs of prestige, perquisites, and power," only does it to a limited extent. It offers jobs to people who work in the federal government when Republicans are in power. Otherwise Republicans go about their daily life in the private sector. That makes the Republicans much more loosey-goosey.

But the Democrats are different. The whole point of the Democratic Party chaps is to organize a patronage system for themselves and their clients fed by government revenues. If you are a Democrat you probably earn your living in the education establishment, or a health/welfare bureaucrat or client, an NGO activist, or a government program benefits recipient. Your whole life is organized around the continuance of that government salary or benefits. Obviously, Democrats cannot relax for a moment. They must stay organized in their citadels of government largesse, ready to repel insurgents at any moment. Because if the Republicans ever took that money away...

The Democratic machine presents an awful power to the world. It has to. For anyone that breaks ranks, well, there's always the ancient threat: That's a nice little teaching job you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it.

But we should take our inspiration from that other formidable political machine, the Soviet Union. It specialized in frightfulness, right up until the day that it collapsed, as the Marxists like to say, of its internal contradictions.

The problem with the Democratic Party is that it has promised itself and its supporters loot and plunder that cannot possibly be delivered. Sooner or later the whole thing is going to collapse, because it will just run out of money.

When people worry about the lack of unity in the Republican Party, they have a point. But in the long term, this lack of unity is a strength. The really scary thing is the rictus of smiling unity in the Democratic Party. The day that smile breaks will be a day to behold.

Our Friendship vs. Their Resentment

After the success of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, some of our liberal friends are determined not to be outdone. Labor and religious leaders and the NAACP are organizing a rally on the National Mall for October 2.

"The AFL-CIO is determined that the Tea Party and its corporate backers are not going to get the final word,” said AFL-CIO executive vice president Arlene Holt Baker. "We will expect tens of thousands of union families to come." "We are fueled by hope and not hate," Holt Baker said.

I have a suggestion for the labor and religious leaders and the NAACP. Don't.

If you chaps mount a rally it will show up a profound difference between the goal and the vision of the Beck folks and the goals and vision of you lefty chaps.

The difference that will come out for all to see is the difference between friendship, not to mention faith, hope and charity, and the resentment that powers the left.

The mainstream of western thought owes much to the commonplace assertion of Aristotle, that we are social animals. The notion of human sociability suggests the idea that we should resolve our differences in a spirit of friendly negotiation rather than by force.

That was the point of the Restoring Honor rally. It was a friendly gathering. In fact the folks that attended spent a lot of the time friending each other on Facebook. A young black woman at the rally told the media not to call her an African American, but an American. "These are my family," she asserted, echoing the words of an older black man who testified to the media back in the spring.

The speakers at the Beck rally also emphasized the Christian values of faith, hope, and charity, not to mention the notion of the providential God that is shared by both Christians and Jews.

They did not mention specific goodies they wanted in recompense for past injustice.

Living under a providential God, or blessed to live in the culture of American exceptionalism, we Americans discover a responsibility to deserve the providential love of God. So the rally speakers emphasized that the future begins with us, with our dedication to responsibility, friendship, kindness.

But the left believes in a culture of resentment, a resentment nurtured in the minds of helpless victims cheated of their rightful place in the world by oppressors and exploiters.

There is, of course, plenty of injustice in the world, and resentment is a natural sentiment that all of us experience. We resent the friend that got into Harvard when we didn't, the co-worker that gets a promotion that we didn't, the guy that got the girl that we didn't. Resentment shows up in the seven deadly sins as envy, only resentment is envy on steroids.

You want to watch that envy, because, according to Roger Scruton in A Political Philosophy resentment is the emotion that leads to totalitarianism.

I see [resentment] as an emotion that arises in all societies, being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others, institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies, authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.

Once the resentful acquire power they reduce everything to pure power, and "dispense with mediating institutions"; individual rights are replaced by central control. We have seen how this works. Central control everywhere seems to mean bureaucracy.

Converted into a "centralized power structure" society becomes transformed into an army. An army is, after all, a centralized power structure for projecting power on neighboring territories.

But in the totalitarian power structure the power is directed inside the territory, at groups targeted for punishment. These targeted groups become the replacement for the ancient scapegoat in which tribal societies purged themselves of the wrath of the gods.

The Jacobins targeted the aristocrats and then "emigrés." The Soviets targeted the bourgeoisie and then "kulaks." The Nazis targeted the Jews. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) targeted Communists.

Our liberal friends, unfortunately, have too often toyed with this inflammatory material. They used to target the malefactors of great wealth. Then it was the big corporations. Then it was the racist South. It used to be the religious right, but now it is the Tea Party activists, who are stigmatized and marginalized as racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes.

It is, of course, laughable to turn the Tea Party into the liberal scapegoat-du-jour. These chaps haven't done anything yet except go to rallies and pitch out a couple of Republican senators.

But there is a bigger issue in the resentment/scapegoat dynamic. In its original form, the scapegoat was the king. It had to be. It must be the king who must be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. That should be obvious. The king is the representative of the tribe or nation. If something has gone wrong, then he should take the blame. To sacrifice a lesser person is an insult to the gods, and would provoke the gods to greater wrath.

The scapegoat concept is understood in the corporate and military shibboleth that, when things go well you say that your team were the ones that made it possible. When things go wrong, then you, the leader, take the blame.

President Bush understood this. He understood that he had to be the national scapegoat for the unpopular war against terror. He bowed his head and took it like a man--like a mensch, you might say.

But liberals don't understand this. That is why they are going ahead with their October 2 rally, which will doubtless be a display of liberal resentment. Of course, Jim Wallis, liberal evangelical, insists that it will all be sweetness and light. "[W]e must move this country forward beyond divisiveness and hate, to rebuild and reclaim our destiny," he says.

But then why does organizer Holt Baker talk about the "Tea Party and its corporate backers?" Corporate backers? He means, one assumes, the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers and the Scaife family that fund groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

My advice to liberals is to put money into keeping as many of your senators and representatives in the game as possible. make sure that your troops are properly led and execute on a good strategic retreat.

But don't try to pretend that you can turn out a grass-roots movement this fall that can rival the Tea Party.

Because if you showcase your political philosophy of resentment up against the Beck philosophy of Restoring Honor you guys are going to look like the sore losers.

I Just Got a Tingle!

For the last couple of years I've sneered at liberal Chris Matthews and his famous tingle. But now I take it all back.

Needless to say, my tingle--and yes, it was in my leg--had nothing to do with President Obama. It came at the end of an American Spectator blog by Ben Stein. It had to do with the comments of his Hispanic gas station attendant.

"We have to wake up," he said. "Those people want to hurt us. Then they want to build a mosque. Why? To hurt us more? And how come Obama always takes the side of the people who hate us? Isn't this his country, too? What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know he's an American? Or what is he? This country has to wake up and get rid of Obama."

I nodded. "I agree," I said.

The man shook his head. "This country has to wake up," he said again. "We elected Obama. We made a big mistake. Now we have to fix it. Stop him, then get someone else in there. Someone who is an American. Someone who works for us, not our enemies."

Tingly stuff, I'd say. Because it tells a very big truth about America and American history.

At some point every immigrant stops thinking of himself as a helpless victim oppressed by a big bad America. He stops hugging the side of the swimming pool in the shallow end with all the liberal swimming instructors and strikes out into the deep end. He finds out the amazing, almost unbelievable truth about America. He belongs. He finds himself thinking of himself as a non-hyphenated American. He starts talking about "we." He finds, out there in the deep end, that when he gets into trouble and asks for help, Americans will come and help.

Perhaps he plucks up his courage and goes to a Tea Party--where all those racist whites hang out. And he finds out that he's welcome, that the sharp-faced middle-aged white women are pathetically grateful to see him there.

He finds out that everything the liberals told him is a lie, that all those awful racists and bigots of which he's heard tell are just folks.

Maybe he even gets a tingle running up his leg.

It's Conservative Nostalgia Time Again

A recurring theme in conservatism is a nostalgia for the good old days. What happened to the good old days when conservatives were high-toned philosophers like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol?

David Klinghoffer's piece in the Los Angeles Times is just the latest in the genre. He deplores the new generation of conservatives like the "potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart".

Liberals have an identical nostalgia. Not for the good old days when The New Republic and Herbert Croly bestrode the world like a colossus, but when conservatives were gentlemanly and consensual--like Bill Buckley.

Iowahawk David Burge delightfully burlesques the high-toned conservative brigade in the persona of T. Coddington Van Vorhees VII. who is always getting together with his pals "Dame Peggy Noonan" and the two Davids, Brooks and Frum, to grumble snobbishly about the rubes taking over the movement.

I never seem to hear of liberals deploring their potty-mouthed publicists. They seem to be quite happy letting the philosophers get on with philosophizing and the street fighters get on with their hand-to-hand verbal combat.

Why don't the liberals tut-tut about the low-rent liberals, from the MSNBC ranters like Keith Olbermann to the racist Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?

There was a time when liberals were exclusively high-toned. That was in the days of the Progressive Era, that flourished presidentially from Theodore Roosevelt (R) to Woodrow Wilson (D). But in the 1920s the Progressives went out of favor with the American voters. It was the genius of Franklin Roosevelt to create a coalition of the high-minded Progressives and the street-fighting big city machines in the Democratic Party and call it liberalism.

However they were presented to the American people, all Democratic presidents since FDR except Jimmy Carter have been frank products of political machines. Truman came from the Prendergast machine, Kennedy from the Boston Irish Mafia, Johnson from the solid Democratic South, Clinton from an Arkansas machine that he turned into a personal political machine, and Obama, the perfumed product of the Chicago machine.

These machine politicians have understand that there are always plenty of high-toned publicists ready to perfume the air around them with high-toned words. Behind the propaganda, they get on with the job of wheeling and dealing, holding their friends close and their enemies closer, and looting the public fisc.

In my view, the last few years have seen a breakout in the power of the low-rent conservatives. The unexpected eruption of the Tea Party movement is canonical. It's the power of the Internet synergizing with genuine political bottom-up rebellion.

It is telling that the Democrats all thought the Tea Parties were a put-up job, "astroturf" organized by Republican political operatives. In fact, the Republican establishment was just as surprised by the Tea Parties as anyone else, and not a little afraid of the movement.

Conservatism will never be exclusively high toned again, so the Van Vorhees chaps had better get out the air freshener.

Liberals Conspire to Play Race Card

I'm generally opposed to conspiracy theories. I'm like Henry Higgins,

A patient man am I, down to my fingertips, the sort who never could, ever would, let an insulting remark escape his lips Very gentle man... But let a liberal in your life!

The thing about conspiracies is that people, especially politicians, are really too lazy to operate a proper conspiracy.

But now we learn that liberal journalists on "JournoList" did in fact conspire, in the strict sense of the word, to play the race card in 2008 over Reverend Wright and his racist remarks. Their problem was that the exposure of videos showing Barack Obama's pastor delivering racist rants in church would damage the narrative of Obama as a "post-racist." Jonathan Strong at the Daily Caller:

Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage. In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Then of course we have the "N-word" accusations, that Tea Party activists shouted racist epithets at black congressman as they walked from a House office building to the Capitol for the key vote on ObamaCare. As Scott Johnson of Powerline writes to New York Times reporter Matt Bai:

Let me elaborate just a bit. Specifically, you said: "There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol." This statement is demonstrably false on several grounds. The folks at Power Line have rather exhaustively examined this issue and it is quite clear that Carson's claim was either knowingly false when made, or that he was seriously mistaken. Moreover, your statement repeats and even adds to a baseless narrative that is being desperately repeated by officials within the Democratic Party.

Here's an all-American one liner about race, that issues from the resolution passed at the NAACP convention accusing the Tea Party of racism. I have polished it to make it snappier.

There's a difference between the Tea Party and the NAACP. In the Tea Party you look for racism on the fringe. In the NAACP you look for racism on the stage.

There is no need to get angry about all this liberal race-card playing. It's gone beyond that. Liberals are like the boy who cried Wolf! Liberals have loved the power that the race card gives them, and liberals, the Ruling Class, love power. But one day the American people will tell liberals to shut up.

My guess is that that day occurred some time between President Obama's inauguration in 2009 and the passing of ObamaCare in the spring of 2010.

Palin Trumps Race Card

Ever since the dawn of time--well the 1960s, anyway--Democrats have been playing race cards from the bottom of the deck in the national game of bridge. And they have won rubber after rubber with their cheating.

Yesterday, July 13, for instance, the NAACP played the race card on the Tea Party, passing a resolution accusing it of tolerating bigotry. No doubt they expected Tea Parties to scurry and hide under rocks, as people usually do when accused of racism.

But today, July 14, 2010, is a day that will live... Well, it will mark the turning point on race.

Today Sarah Palin used her Facebook page to blast the NAACP and its resolution.

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.”

Then off she goes, talking about a nuisance suit she just won over a "spurious charge of racism," Tim Scott, "poised to become the first African-American Republican Congressman from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction", and Todd's Yupak Eskimo family. Wow. Seems to me that Palin had a few shells in the ready-use locker and was just waiting for this opportunity.

Now, I'd say, the boot is on the other foot and a shocked NAACP is finding itself on the defensive.

It has taken a while, but liberal commentators like Michelle Cottle of The New Republic are beginning to acknowledge that Sarah Palin is an extraordinary political talent. There's a reason for this, of course. Palin has come up the hard way in politics, starting out as a city councilwoman in 1992. If she weren't good we wouldn't know about her.

Who could blame the white Tea Partiers if the race-card argument were true? Ordinary middle-class whites, as I blogged yesterday, are the chaps that the political elite has forced to pay for its race-based affirmative action programs. If lower-income whites (who have nine-to-one odds against admission to selective colleges compared to lower-income blacks) were the darlings of the liberals, as they were in the 1930s, they would be in the streets, led by the liberals, demanding justice.

Instead lower-income whites have borne the insults of an overweening elite for nearly two generations. Finally they have taken to the streets. It is not over race, but over the simple idea of freedom and out-of-control government debt. As Sarah Palin writes, Tea Partiers are people

who simply want government to abide by our Constitution, live within its means, and not borrow and spend away our children’s futures.

Yeah. That just proves they are racists.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin has scored a hit, a palpable hit.

Young Turk Doesn't Get It

Liberal commentator Cenk Uygur doesn't want to hear messenger Lee Harris. He'd rather stick with his liberal faith system. That's my take from Cenk's interview with Harris on The Young Turks. (Cenk is a Turkish American. Get it?)

In his new book The Next Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite, Lee Harris fleshes out the commonplace conservative meme that the tea party movement "is only the latest installment of an ongoing cultural war that began long before the current economic crisis. It is a rebellion against a self-appointed intellectual elite" that knows what is best for everyone.

Liberal Cenk wants none of it. But his arguments against Harris are instructive.

First of all, he argues that, while he accepts the Tea Party disillusionment with the bailouts, he also believes that Tea Partiers, while not actually racists, are still protesting the passing of their power. They can no longer pass the same job down to their sons, because there is a pesky Hispanic or black competing for that job.

And the Tea Party rage is misdirected. It's not the liberal elite that's the problem, it's the "establishment" in Wall Street and Washington, insurance companies that want to cut you off for a pre-existing condition, eevil corporations, etc.

Now this, to me, shows a very interesting blindness. It is addressed this very day by Victor Davis Hanson in "The Technocrats' New Clothes." Climategate, the Icelandic volcano, and the Greek meltdown tell us that the all-knowing technocratic elite don't know so much after all, writes Hanson.

So let's go back to Cenk's two arguments. First of all, the only reason that a father could pass a job down to his son was that the liberal elite insisted we had to give monopoly powers to labor unions, and institute "prevailing wage" laws that discriminated in the 1930s against unorganized Negro workers. Anyway, since labor unions in the private sector are almost defunct, except in government protected sectors like autos and government construction, what's the problem, except where powerful liberals get to put their kids into elite universities.

If there is a passing of power, it is that the once-favorite clients of the liberal elite, the white working class, are no longer favorite clients. But the white working class never had much power. The political power then and now resided with the liberal political, educational, and cultural elite.

Secondly, the power of the Wall Street and Washington "establishments" issue directly from the power and size of government. If government weren't so big and powerful, then the Washington establishment wouldn't be so powerful. And if government weren't sluicing so many bonds through Wall Street then the Wall Street establishment wouldn't be so powerful.

Why is government so big and powerful? Because liberals, through their dominance of the day-to-day public square, particularly through news media, through education, and through the TV and movies, want government to be involved in everything from health care to the environment.

When you decide that you want most things decided in the political sector then you create a huge political establishment trying to influence the way that the trillions of dollars are spent. But that establishment is an establishment that the liberal elite wished into being with their big-government political philosophy.

There have been some comments in recent days about the decline of the old WASP establishment. The elevation of Elena Kagan, Jewish American, to the Supreme Court would mean that there are almost no Protestants left on the court, according to Robert Frank. The Protestant establishment has slowly declined away from its once all-powerful domination of politics and culture.

Well yes. But the point is that the WASPs have gracefully allowed new competitors to displace them. They have not used the power of the state to keep the newcomers down. They played by the rules, and the rules moved them out of power.

But what about the liberal elite? First of all, liberals like Cenk Uygur deny that they even constitute an elite. Why would they want to do that? Secondly, when challenged, they fight dirty. You can start with the vilification of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, George W. Bush, Miguel Estrada, and Sarah Palin. You could continue with the bare-knuckle governing methods that rammed the unpopular health bill through Congress.

The great question facing the United States is not that there are populists that have less than pure motives for their populist rage, or that the populist activists are likely to be misled by special interests. Hey, what else is new?

The great question is whether the liberals will go quietly when they are shown the door.

Tea Party: First Blood

If the Tea Party means anything it means limited government. That means government is limited.

So maybe it's appropriate that the first real casualty should be a Republican senator from Utah, Robert Bennett. He was denied a place on the Republican primary ballot for the US Senate by the Utah Republican State Convention.

If political principles mean anything, they should mean that we, our side, our guys, follow our principles. Principles mean nothing if they are just cats-paws that we use to scratch the other side.

That's what the Democrats did with their two election victories in 2006 and 2008. They ran on Republican principles of waste and corruption. And the American people responded. But as soon as they were elected they proceeded to pay themselves a $787 billion stimulus and ram through a monstrous ObamaCare that will waste trillions. All that stuff wasn't supposed to apply to Democrats, just eevil Republicans.

First put your own house in order. Maybe teaching over-spending Republicans a lesson will let the odd Democrat through, so the new Congress in 2011 won't be as conservative as it might be. But principles matter. It matters that, if we conservatives believe in limited government, we hold our office-holders to that standard before we hold Democrats to that standard.

We're not talking about a mad consistency. We are just talking about a sensible practical consistency that people, especially moderate voters, can respect.

Above all, the people that must earn our respect are the Tea Party moms like Dana Loesch. They are thinking about the future of their children.

"Motherhood itself has become a political act," says Ms. Loesch. "And the tea parties are an extension of our need as moms to protect the future for our children."

It was about a year ago that I wrote that we needed a woman-centered conservatism. But the gals were there before me.

Mind you, it makes sense. After the exhilaration of liberation, women are now back to thinking about the big picture. And the big picture for women means the welfare of their children and their families.

When you think about the welfare of children and of families, you start to think about limiting the power of government. It just comes naturally.

Rush as Svengali?

Liberal women are starting to regret voting for Obama, according to blogger Bookworm.

But they are afraid. They are afraid that if they start listening to Rush he will hypnotize them--just like Svangali! When she's riding in the car with a liberal friend, Bookworm suggests turning on Rush. "No, no, I don't want to do that."

So here we have a woman who realizes that she made a mistake voting Democrat this election, who is open to conservative news (I believe her when she says she watches Fox), yet who assiduously avoids any contact with Rush. Incidentally, this was not a one time-0nly conversation. I had virtually the same conversation with two other regret-filled liberals.

How about that "regret-filled liberals?"

I think there is an important lesson here for conservatives. Don't frighten the horses. These liberal women are afraid. They are afraid they have made a terrible mistake. In particular, I suggest, they are afraid they have elected a president who is going to embroil the US in conflict, and women like to avoid conflict.

Remember. First we got the security moms. It looks like Bookworm was one such. Now it is time for the... er, well what do we call them? Hope-and-change moms?

The thing to remember about women is that they need to do the right thing. That's not because they are bad but because they are good. A woman's honor is her chastity, which means being clean and good, and doing right by the other women in her community of women.

Obama seduced these women by promising a world of sweetness and light. But he is delivering a world of conflict and Chicago Rules bullying. Women hate this sort of thing.

And even worse, Obama is threatening the well-being of the mothers and the children of women in America.

Stepping back to the larger picture, the reason that politics has become all about being "nice" is women. Back in the old days when only men voted, politics could afford to be bare-knuckled, with fighting firemen the backbone of the old Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Men love that, but women hate it, and women have the vote.

Also, women are more suggestible. So politics is now all nicey-nicey.

Except that Obama politics is not nicey-nicey, but bare-knuckle, f-word, Rahm Emanuel street fighting.

No wonder the Democrats are trying to smear the Tea Party movement as violent and racist. So far, the Tea Party has been remarkably hospitable for women. It has been friendly and full of laughter, and many of its headline figures are women. But if women can be encouraged to believe that the Tea Party is violent and nasty, why then they will be afraid to get involved.

Just like they are afraid to listen to Rush.

Tea Party Not Radical Enough

I know that the radical and angry Tea Party movement is said to be full of racists and homophobes. But what bothers me is that it's not radical enough.

David Harsanyi in The Denver Post has been reading the CBS/NYT poll on the Tea Party movement.

[They] are more educated than the average American, more reflective of mainstream anxieties than any populist movement in memory and more closely aligned philosophically with the wider electorate than any big city newsroom in America.

They send their children to public schools and "majority of them also deem Social Security and Medicare worthy taxpayer burdens."

Oh dear. That's a shame. It means that the Tea Party folks aren't ready to get serious.

Social Security and Medicare are at the heart of the budget problem. That's because, according to the latest numbers being thrown around, the politicians have promised about $100 trillion more in benefits than current taxes can deliver.

In short, we can't pay for what we've been promised. (Forget ObamaCare!) Something will have to change. Otherwise the United States will end up like Argentina--which recently defaulted on its national debt and raided everyone's bank account--or Greece--which may or may not stop short of default.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. When the national government defaults then the economy takes a dive and ordinary people suffer. Here's how.

• Pensioners lose their dollar denominated savings, because of devaluation or inflation.
• Lots of marginal businesses go under. Lots of average people lose their jobs.
• The poor suffer most. Especially today, where the government spends trillions every year on the poor. The Poles have a word for it: "eating the paint off the walls."
• People will compete for a share of the smaller pie in the political sector. That will increase social conflict, setting American against American, group against group. People will rush for protection under some powerful patron.

It won't be a pretty sight. And it's a pity that the Tea Party folks are not yet ready for radical action. That is, they are not yet ready to give up on their share of the loot.

But they will. We all will. Because when the balloon goes up, we'll all know that the world starts again for us. At zero.

And that is a shame. Because we could take measured, sensible steps right now to reform Social Security and Medicare so that they don't break the bank.

But we won't. Because nobody, not even the Tea Party movement, is ready to get serious.

Give David Brooks a Break

Over the last few weeks conservatives have been taking it out on David Brooks, the quota conservative columnist at The New York Times.

People have particularly sneered at his piece, "The Wal-Mart Hippies," comparing the Tea Party movement to the New Left of the 1960s. Jonah Goldberg sneered at Brooks here and here.

But this is missing the point. David Brooks is a conservative writing for The new York Times. He's not going to talk to NYT readers the same way he would talk to conservatives.

When you have a gig like Brooks', as the sole conservative in a liberal paper, you have a choice. You can be like Al Hunt, who used to be the sole liberal writing op-eds at The Wall Street Journal. Al used to give Journal readers, week after week, the liberal line. It was useful, because it's helpful to get the liberal line laid out in a 800 word op-ed. But it didn't persuade.

Another approach is the line of Thomas Frank, the current sole liberal op-ed columnist at the Journal. Frank is the author of Whatever Happened to Kansas? in which he wonders why the working stiffs of Kansas are all voting for conservatives against their economic interest. Thomas has chosen to poke Journal readers in the eye. Almost all of his columns are insulting to conservatives, like this one.

But David Brooks has chosen a different approach to NYT readers, so much so that he infuriates conservatives who find that their liberal friends are sending them his columns in the spirit of: See? Here's what a reasonable conservative thinks! Why can't you all be like Brooks?

But I think Brooks is playing a deeper game. He wants to persuade the NYT readers that conservatives really aren't so bad after all. So he writes sympathetically. Do NYT readers sneer at the Tea Party movement? Brooks compares the movement to a movement that his readers know and love, the left-wing movements of the 1960s. Then there's his "educated class" article where he gently informed his educated class readers that they were sitting on top of a land-mine, that average Americans didn't like their rational, technocratic government, and didn't think it represented their interest.

Here's the point. Brooks may actually persuade some of his readers that they have a problem. Isn't that more effective that just parroting the party line or sticking people in the eye?

By-the-numbers Conservatism

There are all kinds of conservatives and all kinds of conservatism.

Some people say there are three kinds of conservatives: economic, social, and national-security.

Then there's Ken Blackwell's six-legged stool: social conservatives, Christian conservatives, Second Amendment conservatives, economic conservatives, philosophical conservatives, national security conservatives.

How many conservatives does it take to change a light-bulb?

But for my money, the guy to watch is John Hawkins. You could call him a by-the-numbers conservative. Today, he's got "Five Ways Liberals Misjudge the American People." That's a helpful thing to know when liberals are about to cram down a government takeover of health care down your throat. It gives you hope that, when they are actually asked what they want, the American people will want the monstrosity of ObamaCare repealed.

How do liberals misjudge the American people? Hawkins counts the ways:

1. They believe the American people want liberal policies.
2. They believe that many Americans don't know what's in their own best interests.
3. They believe that the American people want to be treated like children.
4. They believe that most conservatives are evil.
5. They believe they can lie to the American people without consequence.

Hawkins does a nice job of tossing these notions up in the air and snapping at them. But let us step back a moment. When you look at the five things that liberals believe about the American people that ain't so, you realize something.

If you wanted to cram down your agenda on the American people then you'd have to believe these things. You'd need to believe them in order to convince yourself that your cruel, corrupt, unjust program is the soul of caring, compassion, and justice. Of course the American want liberal things, except for those (in Kansas) that don't get it. Of course the American people want to be taken care of, otherwise the eevil corporations will get them. Of course conservatives are evil: they oppose all the good things that liberals want to do.

And of course it's necessary to tell a porky or two. Didn't Plato condone the "noble lie" so that the Guardians could create and sustain their Republic?

What I find astonishing, given the wall-to-wall liberal environment in which we live, is that something like the Tea Party movement is possible. As Hawkins says:

Your kids are exposed to liberalism at school, Hollywood forces liberal ideas down your throat when you watch TV, the local paper leans left -- you just can't get away from it.

So how come you can get, all of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, a Tea Party movement with people waving Don't Tread on Me flags? These are not profound intellectuals who have studied the classics off in a corner at Hillsdale College. These are bread-and-butter Americans who go to work, obey the law, and pay their taxes. Yet they have somehow picked up a world-view that collides head on with their liberal masters.

As the philosophers say: How is that possible?

Like liberals, I sometimes think that we conservatives don't understand the American people at all!

The Trouble with Specifics

The Tea Party movement is coming up with a Contract from America for this fall. It's a grab bag of conservative favorites, from ending runaway spending to tax reform and transparency. What it doesn't do is address the only two things that matter. They are Social Security and Medicare.

Actually, Social Security is not that big of a problem. But Medicare is. Say what you will about ObamaCare, but it had a plan to curb Medicare spending: Rationing with death panels. Never mind if it was a stupid plan. Never mind whether it would have worked. It was at least a plan.

Of course the big impact of Medicare is still a decade or so away. That's when baby-boomers like me will be seriously hitting the last-six-months-of-life syndrome and chewing up health care like you wouldn't believe. Meanwhile there are plenty of things that can be done to curb the cost of government. But every one will hit a powerful special interest. Here, just for giggles, is the current state of the game on government spending. It's from usgovernmentspending.com, of course.

United States Federal State and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2010
Amounts in $ billion
Pensions: $987.4
Health Care: $1,081.6
Education: $1,041.8
Defense: $896.2
Welfare: $750.1
Protection: $350.0
Transportation: $269.3
General Government: $133.1
Other Spending: $581.7
Interest: $309.2
Balance: $104.4
Total Spending: $6,504.7

It can't be emphasized enough that the big dollars are all in the big four: Pensions (i.e., Social Security and government employee pensions), Health Care (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid), Education (the Blob), and Defense. Welfare is up by 50 percent, on account of the recession, but that will probably subside.

The big problem is that the government is paying for pensions that people ought to save on their own, and it is paying for health care for seniors that they ought to be paying on their own.

Not all people. But most of us. There's a role for government in helping people who have failed to provide for themselves, although families, churches, unions, and fraternal associations would probably do a better job. But the big problem is that government has promised gigantic benefits that it can never deliver. Politicians made those promises in order to win elections.

When the government runs out of money, it won't be the politicians that will suffer. It won't be the educated liberals that will suffer. It won't be the professional classes and the businessmen. It will only be the lower layers of the middle class. It will be the poor and the near poor. They will suffer. They will have to go without the health care that can make the last years a little more comfortable.

Yet it was the poor and the near poor that the modern welfare state was supposed to help.

It's a bit late to say this now, but government is just the wrong agent to provide any of these services. If you want insurance against risks, buy insurance. If you want to stop working, do some saving. If you want the comforts of health care, get a job.

But that's what we must work for. A government that only does the things that absolutely require force. Defense. Policing. Law. But humans have always been freeloaders, and they always will.

Meanwhile, let's watch the political system dance around the 800 pound gorillas in the room: Social Security and Medicare.

Confucius and the Community Organizer

That excellent force for law and order, Lt. Chan of the San Francisco Police Department often had resort, during the process of unraveling a crime, to a maxim of Confucius.

Here is one retailed by Karl Jaspers in Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus.

When asked, "What is the first thing to be done in order to promote a renewal in disastrous circumstances?" Confucius gave a remarkable answer: Words must be set aright... [For] language is constantly misused, words are employed for meanings that do not befit them...

If the language is in disorder, everything goes wrong.

Now this saying of Confucius gives me remarkable hope. For the defining characteristic of this time, when the Community Organizer-in-chief is president, and language is in disorder, is that the community is organizing itself.

President Obama is a man who thinks of himself as having a remarkable gift with words. It is patently obvious, after a year of his presidency, that he abuses this gift damnably. He uses words in order to mislead. And the worst of his abuse is his promise that, if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.

His language is in disorder.

It is clear, moreover, that the deeper the president gets into trouble, the more he grabs recklessly for le bon mot to get out again. And he's not too careful about the truth. The contrast with President Bush is palpable. Liberals made a huge fuss about the Iraq "lie," but the truth is that President Bush was always very careful about what he said. He understood that every word was engraved in the book of history.

So, the first thing to do, when the president uses words for "meanings that do not befit them" is that we, the people, must set words aright.

And wouldn't you know, the people are. The people began this work within a month of the president's inauguration.

And here is the beauty of this process. The president is a practitioner of a profession that believes that when the people hurt a community organizer must go down among them and organize them. Mr. Obama himself started out organizing the folks in South Chicago who had been laid off from the big steel plant closures.

But the problem was that the steel plants were never going to open again. The good paying union jobs were gone forever, and Barack Obama, organizer, was never going to get those jobs back again. Barack Obama was organizing people for a useless war.

The left-wing world view sees the people has helpless victims, camping out in the ruins left behind by a rapacious capitalism, waiting for left-wing radical suits to come and rouse them into a fighting force. That may be true of South Chicago. But it is not true of the United States as a whole.

America is a middle-class country. The middle class does not wait around helplessly like victims. The middle class organizes itself for action and, once organized, it gets going.

And this is exactly what the Tea Party movement is doing. To me, the representative figure is Republican congressional candidate Les Phillip. Glenn Reynolds reports:

He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama's fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year. "Somebody had to speak," he told me, "so I stepped up."

That was the America that Alexis de Tocqueville experienced in the 1830s in which people just stepped up to join associations to get things done.

That America still lives in us today. And the tingling feeling that I am getting is that this America is heading into the most remarkable political season in our lifetimes. Why? Because the governing elite is out of touch.

It is commonplace to accuse both parties of being out of touch, but I believe that maligns the poor benighted Republicans. They would like to do what needs to be done, but they are afraid.

It is the "educated class" that is out of touch. It is out of touch because, for the last century, it has been in broadcast mode, telling the people what to think and shutting out voices that disagreed with it.

All along the water was rising behind the dam, but the educated class and its political arm, the Democratic Party, kept the sluices closed. Now the water is about to overtop the dam. If things go well, the water will cascade down the emergency spillway. If things do not go well, then the water will take out the dam and let loose a raging torrent.

Here, today, in 2010, the American people are determined that "words must be set aright," and they are determined to have nothing to do with the artful, and increasingly desperate words coming out of TOTUS, the teleprompter of the United States.

Either way, as the sports announcers say, it's going to be one for the record books.