nybooks:

Garry Wills

A widely circulated image from the Tea Party protests

The hysteria shown at town hall meetings this summer is simply the tip of an outpouring of organized hostility to government that is unparalleled in our history. We have had wildly emotional opposition movements in the past—red scares, nativist riots, anti-Catholic and anti-Semite outbreaks. And there are some parallels with past forms of extremism. People who think Obama is a Muslim are like anti-New Dealers who thought Roosevelt a Jew or John Birchers who thought Eisenhower a Communist…

Now, however, there is a deeply panicky combination of pathologies—racist, xenophobic, fundamentalist—screaming about death camps and euthanasia and baby-killers and 9/11 conspiracies (by the “truthers”). Every aspect of our present government is considered illegitimate. Some look at our leaders and recognize nothing of themselves in them. They see a black man as president and cannot even consider him a citizen, a Christian, a sane man—he must be a Muslim, a Nazi, a Hitler. They see a Latina on the Supreme Court. They see a woman as secretary of state. They see a black attorney general. This is not America.

*Read the whole story after the jump.