But the blame does not fall on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the Republican Party alone. We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing—though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have—and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.
Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”
You are almost right. The Tea Party is a manufactured movement, but the only thing the members have been told is to "be discontented" and "oppose the filthy socialists". They haven't been told what to want, so those free variables range over every possible thing conservatives might want. Safe precious bodily-fluids for some, stupid snake flags for everyone else!I find the argument that the Teabaggers are a "Manufactured" movement a little annoying. The right claimed that the entire left-wing movement during the bush years was created entirely by George Soros. Liberals are at least a little more realistic and not claiming a single mastermind is doing all this.
...becomes part of the conversation in places where, all things considered, we might prefer it not be discussed...—and I think, I think really ultimately above all else, it wasn’t the slap however slight at the seven-year-old girls who only liked something not wisely but too well, and it wasn’t the yearning howsomever ironic for a day when married couples on the screen which was never a mirror anyway always slept in separate beds, dur hur, no, I think, I gotta say, you know, it’s the motherfucking we in that clause that pissed me off more than anything else. (Rhetorically speaking. I mean I’m not pissed at you, Diablevert. I don’t know you from Adam. But that we, goddamn I hate that we. So forgive me if a little spittle slops on you as I direct my vitriol at we.)
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posted by stbalbach at 6:26 PM on May 12, 2010