[Peace-discuss] Mind the gap

[C. G. Estabrook]

...a recent Rasmussen poll ... found that only 21 percent of the American 
population agrees with the statement that the U.S. government has the consent of 
the governed. Rasmussen concludes that the gap between the American population 
and the politicians who rule them “may be as big today as the gap between the 
colonies and England during the 18th century.”

Some draw a parallel to the fury of the militia movement in the mid-1990s, which 
culminated in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah federal building in 
Oklahoma City, killing 168 on April 18, 1995.

But McVeigh’s act was designed specifically as revenge for two lethal onslaughts 
by the federal government, a FBI standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, 
Idaho, which led to the killing of Weaver’s wife by an FBI sniper, and then the 
onslaught by federal agents on the religious group known as the Branch 
Davidians, in their compound outside Waco, Texas. On April 19, 1993, the feds 
incinerated 80 Branch Davidians, some of them children.

A common thread is the populist hostility to central government power, but in 
the mid-1990s, there was not the sharp edge of hatred for the rich and powerful, 
for the corruption of the political system ... that caught the mood of that huge 
slice of America that is the lower-middle class — politically frustrated, 
economically beleaguered and increasingly embittered.

When a vast class feels it has no effective political representation, you have 
an explosive brew. The left, dismayed by Obama’s systematic demolition of all 
their expectations, is nonetheless quiescent. The ferment is entirely on the 
right. The recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. — 
in recent years, a neo-con affair — saw Texas congressman Ron Paul, an outsider 
candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008, win an informal straw poll. 
Paul wants to bring all U.S. troops home and abolish the Federal Reserve.

The Tea Party is an amalgam of angered moderate- and low-income whites. The mood 
is defiant fury and insistence on honoring the regalia of the U.S. Constitution 
and its second amendment, the right to bear arms. It’s not a fascist party. As 
the historian John McMaster wrote of American third parties back in 1896, these 
third parties “have been the expressive features of our political life, and have 
reflected every gust of passion, every unreasonable prejudice, every ennobling 
purpose, every patriotic sentiment that has appealed strongly to the people.”

--from http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2010/03/05/stacks-afterlife/

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