The Sources of American Anger

This article by Victor Davis Hanson in NRO fairly summarizes most of the email traffic I am getting from friends in the States. I summarize his points below:

1. The public senses there are two standards in America - one for elite overseers, quite another for the supposedly not-to-be-trusted public. 
2. The bigot card has played itself out and is now not much more than a political ploy to win an argument through calumny when logic and persuasion have failed.
3. Many believe the Obama administration applies the law in terms of perceived social utility. What is deemed best for the country by an elite few is what the law must be molded and changed to advance.
4. The public recognizes that the advocates of higher taxes are not willing to make the sort of across-the-board spending cuts that once succeeded in balancing the budget.
5. There is also a growing belief that the Obama administration is advancing an agenda that it cannot be fully candid about, because that agenda does not command broad support.
6. Finally, the public has added up the apology tours, the bowing, and the constant emphasis on race, class, and gender crimes, and concluded that this administration sees America, past and present, as the story of a culpable majority denying noble minorities their rights - period.

Well, mutatis mutandis that is what the Brits lapped up for the last thirteen years, and would cheerfully have continued lapping up if the combination of an odious prime minister and a crisis in the financial system had not brought the process to a temporary halt.

Even so, 29% of the electorate voted for more of the same, and 23% voted for the LibDems, the great majority of whom would sneer superciliously at the sources of anger Hanson lists. Actually, I wonder how many Conservatives feel any real anger about what has happened to Britain. As Yeats wrote:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity