Political History

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly.

In 1941, prior to the U.S.'s entry into World War II, the co-founder of this magazine, Henry Luce, penned an essay in LIFE that exhorted "unhappy" Americans, "[distracted] with lifeless arguments about isolationism," to "create the first great American century" — the first, mind you, not the last. We are now entering the second decade of what will be an even more markedly American century; in fact, the Americanization of the world will characterize the foreseeable future far more than the past.

Why is the Republican Party insisting on gridlock in Washington? Why is the Republican minority in California blocking necessary change? The Beltway pundits who attribute everything to electoral cycle gamesmanship do not understand the deeper cause of this scorched-earth policy: demographic decline.

How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire.

Street theater. Communes. Manifestos. Denunciations of "the system." The counterculture is back. Only this time it's on the right.

Political factions that are out of power have a choice. They can form a counter-establishment or a counterculture. A counter-establishment (a term that Sidney Blumenthal used to describe the neoconservatives in the 1970s) seeks to return to power by reassuring voters that it is sober and responsible. A counter-establishment publishes policy papers and holds conferences and its members endure their exile in think tanks and universities.

The tea party movement may have been started by Washington lobbyists, but it has tapped into a powerful strain of American political culture — a strain that has always presented an obstacle to reform in the United States.

American political culture was British before it was American. During the English civil war of the 17th century, two themes crystallized — and have influenced American public discourse to this day. One was the idea of the Ancient Constitution. The other was the idea of the True Religion.

I was flipping channels this week when I came across Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin discussing Barack Obama’s disrespect for the American military. Turns out Obama incorrectly pronounced Navy Corpsman (he pronounced the “s”) at a recent prayer breakfast. (He was in the middle of praising “the extraordinary work our men and women in uniform do all around the world,” but Hannity and Malkin overlooked that part.) “It’s quite galling,” announced Malkin, a decorated veteran herself (I made that up). “What does it tell you about how out of touch this man is with the military?”

Let me get straight to the point: Americans' profound distrust of government is neurotic -- irrational, defensive and born of emotional trauma.

That doesn't mean I discount other sources of our disabling distrust of Washington. I believe the scholars who cite watershed events like Watergate and Vietnam as having undermined our belief in governing institutions.

Of all the kooky conspiracies you've heard about President Obama, from the fanciful notion that he was born in Kenya to Glenn Beck's deeply-held belief that he is a closet Marxist, I can guarantee that you've never heard my own pet theory, which is that Barack Obama is a sleeper agent dedicated to destroying the American left. This isn't literally true, of course. But the president's extraordinary ability to get liberals to abandon their convictions in exchange for symbolic gestures puts Bill Clinton to shame.