Antaeus and the Tea Party

Stanley Fish:

We the people hear this and know who is being talked about, and react with anger: “Don’t presume to tell me what to think and whom to vote for just because you have more degrees than I do. I don’t know much about these people but if you guys are against them, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Mr. Fish gets it, and it's nothing short of astonishing that so few of our elites in politics and the media have before now. Washington seems to have developed the view that it can do whatever it likes and nobody out in the hustings would understand, let alone care about it. But when you suddenly jack up national deficits by trillions and impose a broad new nationalization scheme that harms most people to benefit minorities and do so in the face of a clear and growing public opposition, and then belittle them for complaining, people will remember it when elections come. If there were such a thing as a national recall, Obama would be out on his ear, along with Harry Reid.

[Antaeus, by the way, was a hero in Greek myth "won victory after victory because his opponents repeatedly threw him to the ground, not realizing that it was the earth (in the figure of his mother, Gaia) that nourished him and gave him renewed strength."]