What Rough Beast.....

Something is stirring, brooding, out there.
Sometimes, as Robert Reich said at Town Hall last night, we don't know what it is until after it happens.
But see - a Trump and a Carson getting half the votes in early polls of Republican primary voters.  One is all bombast and noise, the other quietly, as one GOP writer claims this morning, "imbecilic."  Yet they lead, for now, one of our two major political tribes.

When in any other time would a national political candidate - see Carson - be rewarded for comparing the United States to the Nazi Third Reich?  Or say of a medical coverage plan - Obamacare - that it is "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."  Or claim that the sitting President of the United States is modeling his policies after those of Cuba and Russia?  See Carson, again.
Yes, there is always over the cliff rhetoric, but rewarded, cheered on, by so many?

As Peter Wehner, a GOP consultant who served in the last three GOP administrations, writes:"....the usual ways voters judge a candidate - experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues - have been devalued.........Reason has given way to demagogy."

Reich offers a sunnier view - that yes, there's a rumbling out there, but in his Berkely economics classes he sees an idealism, a commitment to public service, and in American history he sees a pattern - that when the political/ecnomic system goes off track, leaving too many out of its benefits, there's adjustment (see TR's progressivism, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's New Society).
That's his sense of this moment, of the anti-establishment fever - a moment for sweeping change, but with a warning that there are two kinds of populism.

- reform populism - see the Roosevelts and LBJ
- authoritarian populism - the rise of scapegoating, of government is evil rhetoric, of obstructionism as policy. See the GOP House, see Trump, Carson, Cruz, et al

Which way history goes depends on a citizenry, its information and drive to seek fact over noise, and its engagement.
Politics, says Reich as so many have before, is not a spectator sport.