When I talk to "liberal" haters I am always astonished that they rarely mean "liberal" at all. `Liberalism' has morphed into something more closely resembling my youthful sense of the idle rich - trivial, dilettantish, pompous, unproductive and spoiled. What I was raised to believe Republicans were.
The rage they feel is nothing less than good, old-fashioned class resentment.
The means by which a cunning power elite has managed to turn that resentment away from themselves and against the very people who struggled to improve the lot of working people in this country has been a stunning achievement. And as we have seen time and again over the last few years many of our nation's most vulnerable have taken to destroying the very institutions that had once empowered them. They do so with a demented righteousness, blinded to the fact that the damage they do only succeeds in hurting themselves.
They are rioters burning down their own neighborhoods.
Of course, there is more to it than that and a deeper analysis is required, one that would trace a century of rapid social change and disorientation and, no doubt, the theme will be developed further.
We have a social elite in this country: we have professional elites, business elites, celebrity elites, media elites etc etc etc. We no longer have a working class elite - we no longer have Philip Randolphs or Mother Jones' - no more tenement demagogues, no more voice of the people stiffs or union firebrands.
What we have is a vast matrix of success - united not in their passion or their idealism but in their dreamy disengagement. Everyone is corrupted by the cult of personality, a value-free stratosphere in which the "real" world passes by without effect or consequence. There is no accountability, only glamour.
It's one of the reasons why Joe Public got impassioned about the recent election but the mainstream media treated it like a football game. A bit of a thrill and then back to cocktails and dinner parties as usual.
That's why even though the Mainstream media tilts increasingly to the right, the Bush supporters only see their dispassionate world weariness as a "Liberal" decadence.
I was reared in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, modest Irish-Catholics who worked like devils, got hammered on the weekends and still managed to look and feel pious by Sunday morning. (hangovers are actually quite helpful in setting the right tone of humility) But I have also, over the years moved in those rarified circles of soirees and receptions - that "club" in which there seemed no difference between a gangster, a drug-addled rock star, an aristocratic beauty, a journalist just back from the Lebanon, a Mother Theresa and a self-made billionaire - that morally suspended neverland where notables mix and mingle without judgment or friction. No one wants to rock the boat.
That meshing of elites is a recent phenomenon, though its origins certainly go back to the rise of popular mass media in the last century. For Americans, perhaps, Truman Capote's famous black and white ball at the Plaza in the early 60s remains a famous example - though it was also the spirit of Studio 54 in the 70s. It is the spirit of Palm Beach and the Hamptons, too. In such a world taking stands is vulgar, politics is just a parlor game. There's a wink of we may not agree but we are all sooo special and different from the rest of them, aren't we?
It is also a world in which both Republicans and Democrats have long moved; Henry Kissinger and Ted Kennedy, come to mind.
So this world is far more defined by it's apolitical nature even if it is just the guests leaving their pistols at the door. Yet to many ordinary Joes, like the ones I meet in any number of old neighborhood locals, they are the heart and soul of what they now condemn as "liberal". They simply do not see the rapacious greed and cronyism which exploits their rage and then laughs at them - all the way to the bank.
This disconnect has always worked in George Bush's favor. The black sheep of the family, the raucous drunk and class clown who can barely utter a complete sentence - he seems to be just like one of them. Yes, George Bush is like one of them but only because he really is too graceless, too gormless, too much a liability and a failure to ever move freely in the circles his parents had craved since they themselves were born.
George Bush has found his métier and his supporters - poor, angry, white men and women who bolster themselves on piety, and rage against those elites whose sophistication and worldliness is an affront to them.
I suspect though that Bush is in a terrible conundrum, that he really craved acceptance by that toney up-scale world of hedonistic indolence and secretly resents that it is only among the barnstorming hucksters of cracker christians that he is loved and admired. Fortunately for George (and unfortunately for the rest of us) they love him as they might a very Ceaser. An adoration which appeals to his deep-running desire for vengeance.
What a pity America emulates the Roman Empire, without having a Roman senate.