Two good articles that I've read recently. One was Matt Taibbi's excellent (per usual) writing in Rolling Stone, this time on the Tea Party. Taibbi does a good job in not simply denigrating tea partiers to racist hicks, but trying to understand the underlying forces behind them (aside from the Koch Brothers.)
You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.
I will post a full review tomorrow, along with a review on Ryan Lizza's article in the New Yorker on the Senate Climate Change bill (and how it all went wrong.)
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