I’m up at Bloggingheads talking American “rustics” with Jim Pinkerton — folks I sometimes refer to, in a spirit akin to Hunter Thompson’s, as “rubes.” One big question is whether Mead’s much-discussed foursquare categorization of Americans — Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian — is good enough today at capturing what’s going on in “rustic” America. Probably not, I think. I can’t be the only one who looks back on Thompson radicals of ’70s Colorado and sees an embryonic coalition: Freak Power and Rube Power. Echoes, perhaps, of what Reihan alludes to with the motto Keep America Weird — borrowed from a place where you can find rubes as well as freaks: Austin, TX.
Friday, April 16, 2010, 11:02 AM
April 17th, 2010 | 9:18 am
For a bunch of reasons, I’ve been reading a lot of pre-Civil War history these last few weeks. And it strikes me that the Tea Parties may belong in the tradition of the Anti-Masons and Nativists–populist movements that combined some rather good ideas with questionable motives and ugly ways of expressing them.
If the pattern holds, the good ideas will be absorbed into one of the major parties. Unfortunately, I fear that the GOP has absolutely no interest in fiscal restraint.
April 17th, 2010 | 2:22 pm
The Democrats are certainly not the answer if you are interested in fiscal sanity.
April 30th, 2010 | 8:12 pm
Both parties have forgotten how to add and subtract.
October 28th, 2012 | 12:56 am
[...] I first suggested in April of last year, and explained this September, it’s a message that rings like a gong today. The line between [...]
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