“

The common core belief, then and now, is actually descended from “Huck Finn” ’s unforgettable Pappy and his views on the “guv’mint”: the federal government exists to take money from hard-working white people and give it to lazy black people, and the President is helping to make this happen. This conviction, then and now, may not fairly be called racist in the sense that it isn’t just (or always) an expression of personal bigotry; rather, it is more like a resentment at an imagined ethnic spoils system gone wrong. (Hatred is less the key than a throbbing sense of unfairness.) Presumably, it makes space for a handful of hard-working black and brown people who are being victimized, too. (If there is much doubt that there is a racial component, the disparate reactions to Obama’s mythical foreign birth in Kenya and Ted Cruz’s actual one in Canada should put it to rest.) A focus group on the current state of the G.O.P., conducted by Democracy Corps, an organization put together by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, was on the whole quite sympathetic to Tea Party and to evangelical feelings of alienation from incomprehensible social change, making it plain that the core grievance is still the over-riding feeling that “their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”

So we don’t have to look any further than our own past to find exact cognates for today’s movement to the right. The fever won’t break, because it’s always this high. The best hope one can hope for is that, somehow, the adjustments to reality get made, even in the face of the ideology. Reality has a way of doing that to us all.

”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/the-john-birchers-tea-party.html