This is an odd ruling elite, the Red State faithful, many of whom reverted to type and wore their cowboy boots and their fur coats to the parade. They are inheritors of both 19th century Methodist notions of human perfectibility and chosenness while, at the same time, the much-older Scotch-Irish sense of swagger and persecution. They are a people who both hate and fear the world and yet want to save it, to teach it what they desperately believe it needs to learn, for its own good. They are people who are convinced they are entitled to run the planet but are also scared to death by almost all of the strange and mysterious folks who inhabit it. That's why it's always fun to watch them take mass transit, like the DC Metro, because they dislike the notion of something like an underground train just anyone can get on to begin with, and look warily at anyone who isn't one of them and hold tight to their wallets. Alternately in charge, and yet completely at the mercy, of everything around them.
The entire article is worth reading, but this is a particularly apt description. His writing style is so literary, if Featherstone ever wrote a novel, I'd be the first to buy it.
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