QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:41 A.M. ET:  In one of the most informed analyses of why the left went berserk this week in its attacks on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal recalls the intellectual basis for much left-wing thought:

What happened in November has to be stopped, by whatever means become available. Available this week was a chance to make some independents wonder if the tea parties, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Jared Loughner are all part of the same dark force.

Who believes this? They do.

The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy. It goes back a long way, it is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the "intensity" that exists now between these two competing camps. (The independent laments: "Can't we all just get along?" Answer: No.)

The Rosetta Stone that explains this tribal divide is Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter's piece for Harper's may be unfamiliar to many now, but each writer at the opening of this column knows by rote what Hofstadter's essay taught generations of young, left-wing intellectuals about conservatism and the right.

After Hofstadter, the American right wasn't just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose. By this mental geography, the John Birch Society and the tea party are cut from the same backwoods cloth.

COMMENT:  Henninger is correct, and I would go beyond his comments.  The cultural divide even includes such items as how someone speaks, the schools someone attended, and, of course, the part of the country from which someone came.

It was only a few years after Hofstadter wrote his essay that the left erupted over Vietnam, and over its dislike of Lyndon Johnson's culture, the way he spoke, his Texas roots.  He wasn't Kennedy.  He didn't have the right diploma.  And Texas was quasi-Southern.  In fact, the hatred against Johnson, a hatred that ignored his vast contributions to civil-rights legislation in 1964, began right after he was inaugurated, and he never overcame it.  He won the 1964 election only because his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was perceived as outside mainstream American politics.

The cultural divide explains much about the attacks on Sarah Palin.  True, she's created some of her own problems.  But had she been from Massachusetts, had she attended Wellesley, had she been pro-choice, the reaction would have been entirely different.

January 13, 2011