First of all, I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about classic white-black racism, though elements of that are present, to be sure. My sense of the teabaggers is more complicated: they are primarily working-class, largely rural and elderly white people. They are freaked by the economy. They are also freaked by the government spending–TARP, the stimulus package etc.–that was necessary to avoid a financial collapse. (I’m not sure Keynes is taught in very many American high schools.) But most of all, they are freaked by an amorphous feeling that they America they imagined they were living in–Sarah Palin’s fantasy America–is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals…to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.