POPULISM FOR THE FORTUNATE

It is said there are 15 million teabaggers. I think most of those were swept up in one part of the protest wave or another - corrupt politics or earmarks or hypocritical officeholders - and are not ready to follow it all the way onto the shore of anarchy.

The real, hard-core teabaggers are a peculiar breed that has come out of our individualistic frontier tradition. They don't want to admit that we are living in a mass society. It doesn't occur to them that there has to be give and take, or that not everyone has their support system and their luck.

They're naive and self-righteous, and their manners are surprisingly bad for such bourgeois people.

Predictably, the unspeakable Rush Limbaugh has praised them effusively: "This is American civic activism at its best." Get that? It's American civic activism at its best to wreck civic gatherings!

They may be good at running their businesses, but in public affairs they are babies. And mostly they are crybabies.

These are not the downtrodden of the earth or even the struggling lower middle class. No one has denied them anything. They have a standard of living that is the envy of the entire world! Just dilate on that one little consideration for a moment.

They see themselves as victims. They are filled with self-pity for no intelligible reason.

They represent themselves as "the people," but this is equivalent to the aristos dressing up like the peasantry, as Marie Antoinette was wont to do.

They believe that they are successful because they work hard, and that the poor don't. They don't see that people all over the world work harder and have little to show for it. They don't see that the West is hogging the world's resources and driving a billion people into desperation, and that they are the beneficiaries of that. They have been dealt a winning hand from the bottom of the deck, and they think they are being cheated!

And what they want is not reform but "revolution." So much for their level of maturity and their sense of proportion.

They slander conscientious public officials and don't care that that's what they're doing. They spread impatience and intolerance.

They possess little knowledge of the past, are attuned mainly to popular legend, and have no historical perspective. To them everything exists in timeless black and white.

They altogether lack a saving sense of irony.

They are without a capacity to be self-critical or to admit that the other guy might have a point once in a while.

They go to church and hear about the Golden Rule and the Good Samaritan, and want a society where the poor are begrudged health coverage. They have no glimmer concerning their own fundamental absurdity.

They think they are patriots. They are spoiled brats.

They try to identify with the country's founding, but with their faith in privilege they would probably have been Tories. Certainly the Founding Fathers - those encyclopedically learned, sophisticated masters of intelligent compromise - were nothing like these oversimplifying, intellectually lazy bellyachers.

What they are above all, I think, is proof of the failure of our system of education.

That they should have gotten all the way through college without an ability to think or to second-guess their assumptions or to care about anyone but themselves is ominous for our society.

Whatever we have been teaching our kids has been the wrong thing, and as a result we are having to swim through foul tea.