Mob Rules

Clearly, democracy doesn't work.

Excerpt from this NEWSWEEK article on the nature of the Tea Party plague:

Nostalgia, resentment, and reality denial are all expressions of the same underlying anxiety about losing one’s place in the country, or of losing control of it to someone else. When you look at the surveys, the Tea Partiers are not primarily the victims of economic transformation, but rather those whose position is threatened by social change. Because racial bias is unacceptable both in American political culture and in an individualist ideology, Tea Partiers don’t say directly what Pat Buchanan used to: that moving from a predominantly white Christian nation to a majority nonwhite one is bad and should be stopped. Instead, their resistance finds sublimated expression through the reality-distortion field: Beck’s claim that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred of white people” or Dinesh D’Souza’s Gingrich-endorsed theory that Obama is a Kenyan Mau Mau in mufti. Of no previous movement has Richard Hofstadter’s depiction of populism as driven by “status anxiety” been so apt.

For the Republican Party, the rise of the Tea Party is the essence of a mixed blessing. The political problem is how to co-opt the movement’s energy and motivational anger without succumbing to its incoherence and being tainted by the wacko voices within it...

As mobs go, Republicans will find this one will be especially hard to lead, pacify, or dispel. The Tea Party is fundamentally about venting anger at change it doesn’t like, not about fixing what’s broken. Turn the movement’s rage into a political program and you’ve already betrayed it.

This is the way of the future.