Ah! Another leftist/Marxist out for a walk among the "natives" trying to understand them.
Has anyone noticed that when the leftist/Marxists attempts to write about the Right it is as if he were an anthropologist trying to understand a foreign people and foreign land?
I leave aside the election of a — “foreign-born” — African-American to the presidency.
Yep! That silly piece of stinking dog pooh! Can't step in that. Imagine!... Those silly birthers insisting that the Constitution be upheld. That's so bizare we'll just "leave that aside". (/s)
Lilla cites as examples the growth in home schooling,
According to the author it is due to libertarianism. It couldn't possibly be due to ineffective teaching practices, violence, moral decay, homosexual infiltration, teachers unions, dumbed-down standards, textbooks that denigrate and/or ignore our nation's history, and Marxist indoctrination in the government schools.
Finally,...Please note the author's picture at the bottom of the essay. He has that same snide, nose uplifted, superior look that Obama has.
This elitist scumbag has probably never visited flyover country. If he doesn't understand our anger now he never will.
Ooooh, the VERY ANGRY Tea Party. It looks like the Monty Python troupe missed a fun possibility when they portrayed the results of the “Serious Party” against “The Silly Party”, “The Very Silly Party” and “The Slightly Silly Party.”
In light of the Gulf Oil disaster perhaps we should temporarily use the words, “Tar Party”.
Though I am at a loss to make the letters TAR into something useful, ideas?
Idiot author should be forced to follow Code Pink around for a year and a day -— then he’ll learn the real meaning of hostility & downright mean nastiness.
America is made up of laws with the root to those laws based on the bible. They need to stop trying to add laws only for a certain person or gender or subvert them with hidden adjendas. It is up to our elected leaders to set the example higher than the bar is already set. Not obey only the ones they like or disagree with.
To the New York Times, the unlimited expansion of the welfare state is such a self-evidently worthy goal that they can’t understand how any legitimate political movement could possibly be opposed to it.
AFAIC not angry enough.
By avoiding town hall meetings, the cowardly Democrats are giving their Republican challengers a great campaign issue. Both Kinzinger in IL 11 and Fitzpatrick in PA 8 are running ads on this issue. I expect many others will as well.
Brilliant Piece. Well Written.
When your paid to deceive, you can’t do much better than this.
Bravo!
This idiot doesn't know the first thing about what Tea Partiers want. The only things he knows about TPers are tiny figments of reality that exist in his fevered, leftist skull.
“It would be comforting if a clear political diagnosis of the Tea Party movement were available — if we knew precisely what political events had inspired the fierce anger that pervades its meetings and rallies...”
It’s the Communism, stupid!
No kidding. I'm not entirely sure it's useful invoking Descartes and Hegel in attempting to find a context for a particular populist political movement, although both men had a good deal of interesting things to say about such movements in general. Positing a broad, formless psychological angst over the disempowerement of individual by government isn't particularly deep analysis when a narrow, very precisely-expressed anger against that very thing is the perfectly defined core of the movement. It is also the only one. One needn't strain to understand it.
Why the anger? Is this really a serious question? Name a single populist movement, including the artificially formed one that placed 0bama in government, that exists without it. Without "Hate-Bush" the Dems would still be on the outside looking in. That is how political movements are formed, and an outward expression of anger is such a basic part of political speech that I marvel at anyone who marvels at it. Clearly the good Professor has been behind a desk too long.
But this particular anger does have a clear target, as the author appears dimly to comprehend. Yes, it is the basic relation of individual to government, but it is not some fuzzy realization that a "myth" of individualism is no longer cogent in the modern world, but that the reality is being taken away. Given the very concrete manifestations of this - a government move on health care, on corporations, the creation of dependent classes, the commitment of future generations to paying for this one's excesses, on the persistent tendencies of the party in power to protect its gains at the expense of the general public - these aren't manifestations of anyone's Hegelian zeitgeist, but facts resented by those who are expressing that resentment in the arena of free speech. In short, it's exactly as it's supposed to be.
Pathological Fear of Constitutional Government-PFCG Syndrome
Maybe there’s Stimulus Grant in DC somewhere ...I could apply for to “help us understand the deep meaning and significance of the fear of Liberty and Freedom”
Or better yet...to define clinical parameters for institutionalization of individuals believing in outdated 18th century ideals....
* for later