Being pushed too far.

Dave Warren Online ...

Familiar with the attitudes of Middle Americans from living among them (unlike the urban intelligentsia of East and West Coasts), Harris provides an apologia for them that is only slightly condescending. They are people whose whole ethos is "live and let live," yet are accused of intolerance for failing to embrace progressive agendas. They are also people who powerfully resent being told how to live. And they have been pushed too far.

The Tea Party movement has arisen in the U.S. (and could easily arise in English Canada) to redress an imbalance. The election of Barack Obama put a crown on the exponential growth of the state, and his extremely ambitious statist agenda is taking Middle America, very fast, to places it has never wanted to go.

Whether you like or dislike Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh (I adore them both), they have articulated the spirit of rebellion against taxes and debt, against sprawling, parasitical bureaucracies, and against "the culture of death."

To the mainstream media -- to that liberal elite generally -- the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some "middle ground" or scrimmage line -- itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this "progress" -- which they could understand -- but want no part of the game.

The Progressives always have a better public platform because that's where they are.  Middle America doesn't write editorials, it works in factories and stores and offices.  It's focus is on family, faith, the home and neighborhood.  They don't hone their debating skills and so they are ill prepared for the ridicule of Jon Stewart and the would-be Jon Stewart writing for the local newspaper. 

But like an animal that can become aggressive when it is tormented, these people can turn on their sophisticated "betters."  And when they do, the intelligentsia who thought they had the lumpen proletariat in check get very afraid.  Especially when they discover that they don't have any answers, no money, their answers don't work, and their emptiness is exposed.  Shouting "Plug the hole" doesn't plug the hole.  Telling people that you are thinking about their problems as you  wake and when you sleep does exactly nothing about fixing the problem.

The problem arises between these two amorphous groups when the latter take the former to be their milch cows. At least in America, that is the point at which the hicks suddenly become seriously interested in politics, organize themselves into things like Tea Parties, and go out looking for results.

This is complicated by the fact that Nanny State has come to the end of her fiscal road. Her ambitions have so far outstripped her means, that we are faced with public finance implosions. In the case of the U.S., deficits and debts were unsustainable even before President Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress put the country on track to double them.

Any way you look at it, the crunch is coming. I do not have the illusion it will be painless, for the Nanny State is utterly unprepared for, and was anyway ill-equipped to handle, popular rebellion.

Nor have we anywhere in view the sort of politicians who could ride the tiger; who have any notion how to radically downsize a government peacefully. Yet we are getting beyond the sort of thing we can vote on.

We have had over a century and a half of domestic peace in this country.  That run of domestic tranquility maybe ending.