Tea party longing for a past that never was; problems with our future

Michael Ventura talks about the tea party and the future of the nation in a recent Austin Chronicle column.

"This is subtler than simple racism. I doubt most tea partiers are more overtly racist than most white liberals. Rather, what's at play is an innate sense of worth conferred by one's birth – a status and an identity that have been not intentionally destroyed but inevitably dissolved by circumstances impossible to reverse. The country they want back no longer exists."

and

"We graduate and fail to graduate hundreds of thousands of unprepared young people every year. This can only make for a population incapable of informed decisions, incapable of improving itself, and incapable of keeping up with what's going on in the rest of the world.
That is not a citizenry. That is a peasantry."