An "August Revolution" Across America

Call them "Tea Partiers", call them right-wing nuts, call them neocons, call them a well-dressed angry mob. But the truth is this summer's crowds of nervous citizens of all ages and stripes (from geriatrics to mohawk-sportin' punks) are no longer accepting the status quo of American politics, and are hell-bent on changing them. Many thought Barack Obama would be the agent of that change, but he was just more of the same, save for an extraordinary thirst for power and a taste for intimidation.

Are we seeing an "August Revolution" in America - people rising up with anger if not violence, to tell their elected representatives to represent, or stay home?

Victor Davis Hanson calls it "Prairie Fire":

There is, again, a mounting anxiety that the current federal expansion is politically-driven in rather radical ways—an effort to create a permanent new constituency of millions who either receive expanded federal largess or are gleefully employed in doling it out. The zealotry of expansive bureaucracy and dependency instills fears, rational or not, of a radicalized huge federal work force, a sort of national version of Acorn to the nth degree that in pack-like fashion is mobilized to target potential naysayers...

Voters are beginning to sense a certain edge to the Obama revolution, a meanness in its class-driven rhetoric aimed at the more successful....

A well educated technocracy—we see such figures in the emblematic Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, or Barack Obama himself —have most of their lives served in government, largely regulating, overseeing, organizing, auditing, and sermonizing far more productive and capable others. One of the worst flaws of this species of utopian technocrat is the notion that he wishes to curtail in others the very things he wishes to enjoy without constraint himself

....I underestimated the righteous anger of those who are daily deprecated by a utopian class—one that has neither the ability nor the fortitude to achieve what it now wishes to undo in others.

VDH just misunderstood America's DNA. We were birthed to believe in freedom, in the pursuit of happiness, in rights that were ours and not the government's to dole out. We fought our war of freedom not to fight off genocide, to fight for land, or for conquest - we fought a long war of Revolution over the right to control taxation, and our representation.

How far the Democratic party has strayed from the nation's roots. Barack Obama, often describing himself as "rootless", was never hard-wired into American's love of their nations. His ugly responses to displays of legitimate protest underscore this.

Peggy Noonan, with more on the August Revolution:

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in....

But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate...All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens...

But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.

Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.

It’s going to be a long August, isn’t it? Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.

If it does - and let's pray it doesn't - it won't be the American people that are to blame. It will be a government that decided to be imperial instead of elected, representatives who mock their concerned constituents as "nutjobs", and a president who sends in union thugs to"quiet the debate", that will be responsible for any unrest we may see in the last summer of the first decade of a new century.

An August Revolution in America? Only if the government makes it happen...