Of course this Sunbelt political culture has tentacles and outposts all over the USA, wherever a few generations of laboring folk enjoyed debt-fueled parabolic rises in living standards during the cheap oil decades, and now find themselves in foreclosure hell, indentured to the very WalMarts that they welcomed with open arms (and allowed to destroy their local businesses) -- and, of course, it's yet another paradox that these are the same folk who will still defend the big box masters to their deaths. The America they stand for is a weird contradictory mish-mash of Confederate nostalgia, hyper-individualism that really owes allegiance to nothing, racial enmity, religious paranoia, and potemkin patriotism -- especially involving anything in the constitution that allows them to wriggle out of obligations to the public interest at the same time that they get to push other groups of people around.
The Tea Party people are the corn-pone Nazis I have been warning you about. They are gathering strength in numbers as President Obama and congress fritter away their remaining legitimacy in a manner of governance that more and more resembles an endless Chinese Fire Drill. The delusional craziness of the Tea Partyists exists in direct proportion to the wimpy deceit of the government, especially in matters of money and statistics reporting. Our political leaders are resorting to wholesale deceit because the truth of our situation -- comprehensive bankruptcy -- is too painful to dwell on and for the most part they are too chicken too state it.
Someone made a comment (last week, I believe) about Mr. Kunstler's Yankee prejudices. There are some aspects of Southern culture that are disordered (the enjoyment of NASCAR), which Mr. Kunstler rightly criticizes, but this is more like Yankee triumphalism.
Who is more likely to support a replacement of the National Government with a more authoritarian government, or even a tyranny, Uhmericans on the "left" or Uhmericans on the "right"? It seems to me that one can find plenty of those who do not care about the Constitution or states' rights on both sides, but it's those on the left who are more likely to endorse further centralization of authority. (There are a few 'liberals' who believe in state sovereignty, but I think they make up less of the total population of the United States than the 'conservative' believers.)
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