there are probably no actual political positions on which david brooks and i agree. but he is the best op-ed columnist working right now. he's been in rare form of late, and this is excellent. one thing it shows about brooks is his distance: it's about what things are like without having to hop immediately to how the anti-"educated" are evil dolts. implicit in this treatment is the idea of the tea party movement is virtually or will become a third party. i've been waiting for the two-party chumpocracy to disintegrate since i was a child, and i've lost hope, really. still it's interesting. not only that, but i agree with every position brooks attributes to the partiers, so it seems like a hopeful moment to me.

brooks sets the thing up as tea party vs educated opinion. one reading of course is that teaparty-type opinion is uninformed, ignorant etc. another way into this is to understand that american education is indoctrination and subordination, both in the 'information" it conveys and in the institutional framework through which it conveys it. a perfect expression of this is that the people who manage to persist as students in such institutions for 25 years - professors in other words - are entirely unanimous; they finally achieve a critical consciousness equivalent to that of mud puddles. i bet if you examined this in detail, you'd see that people who have twelve years of american education agree with one another and with, say, al gore, more than those who have ten years, and so on throughout.