The Teabaggers aren't as simple as black websites want you to believe

There is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left to ridicule them. But that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a ? -fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And, in fact, they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Rush Limbaugh has answered: it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government and run the media. They don't care about you. They just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and ? and communists and so on.

The reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but self-criticism. We are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early ? Germany. ? was appealing to groups with similar grievances and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers: that is, they blame the Jews and the Bolsheviks. They were the problem.