This is the post I wish I had written

Woah:

The Tea Party is at once a very traditional American phenomenon – generally known as a “Great Awakening” – and part of a global insurrection.  In both cases, the status quo is portrayed as oppressive and corrupt, and the rebellion against it is highly moralistic and flows from religious sources.

There is a considerable scholarly literature about America’s Great Awakenings, most recently by the Nobel Economist Robert Fogel.  He describes it thus:

A cycle begins with a…religious revival…followed by (a phase) of rising political effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the political coalition promoted by the awakening goes into decline.  These cycles overlap, the end of one cycle coinciding with the beginning of the next.

Fogel writes of four Great Awakenings:  the first inspired the American Revolution and the triumph of the ideal of human equality.  The second, associated with millenarian convictions, inspired the generation of the Civil War and the women’s suffrage movement.  The third, beginning at the end of the 19^th century, embraced the notion of social sin, according to which personal misery was not necessarily due to an individual’s shortcomings, but a societal failure.  This religious conviction fed into the period of the New Deal and its attendant social engineering.  The fourth—current—Great Awakening started in the 1960s and was marked by a revival of enthusiastic religious practices and by “born again” conversions.  It drove the Reagan Revolution, and inspires the Tea Party’s tax revolt, the attacks on entitlements, and a return to ethics of individual responsibility after the embrace of collective sin in the previous phase.

I wish I'd said that.  The very concept of "American Exceptionalism" is caught up in the religious fervor of these movements - and it's a mistake to think that Progressives mired in New Deal Social Programs aren't just as driven by Americal Exceptionalism as anyone.  It's the fervor that makes them crazy as they feel it slipping away.

This is very, very smart stuff - some of the smartest stuff I've read, which is saying something.  The one thing I'd add is a bit of a downer: Americans go into this sort of fervor in a big way, and always have.

New England through up-state New York (at least) in the 1830s and 1840s were called the "Burned Over District," because of the religious movements that burned from one end to the other, only to be replaced by another.  Joseph Smith founded Mormonism there and then, but he's only one of many.  The fervor of an evangelical spirit that would transform Mankind is an affliction that Americans are peculiarly susceptible to.

The downer is that Abolition was one of those movements, from that period.  It offered the promise of the cleansing flame:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Many countries ended the practice of chattel slavery without resorting to a conflagration that consumed 5% of the male population.  We did not.  We're not the only ones, either - Hitler with the cleansing of the Master Race and Stalin with the "cleansing" of the Kulaks are instructive.

So we need to keep in mind that as we move towards another transformation of the State's relationship with the citizen, that this contains the same seeds of millennial transformation.  A change will do us good; a change amp'ed up to 11 will help nobody.

But it would be a very American approach.