They'll be coming for my dual citizenship

Michael Lind, whom I first read in Up from Conservatism, is always thought-provoking, even when he and I disagree.  But I can't find anything to quarrel with in this:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

Nor in this:

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and their sidekicks from the Midwest and elsewhere to destroy America's credit rating unless the federal government agrees to enact Dixie's economic agenda of preserving defense spending while slashing entitlements is simply the latest act of aggression by the Solid South.

We have a real national political problem that dates from the very beginning of our nation. One part of it, the part I grew up in, doesn't want to be American if that means it doesn't get its own way.

And its way is backward, reactionary, aristocratic, and often violent.