We've spent the month of August talking about alleged right-wing rage, but it's really time we started discussing the Angry White Liberal. When things aren't going his way, the Angry White Liberal wails and gnashes his teeth, rends his garments, and hurls invective at the opposition. His rhetoric and prose is so heated, it's gotten to the point where you need to put on oven mitts before opening the paper. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his positions that he lashes out uncontrollably at anybody who disagrees with him. For the Angry White Liberal, dissent is anathema. Antagonism is illegitimate. Only conformity to prevailing liberal opinion is enough to still his rage.

It's been awhile since the Angry White Liberal was spotted in the wild. He's been in hiding since 2006, when the electorate started handing victory after victory to the Democratic party. For a while there, whenever a liberal surveyed the political scene, it looked as though the country had finally come to its senses. Americans no longer deigned to elect conservatives to high office. In 2008 voters fell for the dulcet tones of a young, charismatic liberal senator from Illinois. A "new progressive era" was about to begin. James Carville's latest book, published earlier this year, promised to explain "how the Democrats will rule the next generation."

Then something bizarre began to happen. As Barack Obama's presidency unfurled, his approval ratings fell. The public showed skepticism at his major initiatives. The federal government bailed out GM and Chrysler over

The more Obama talked about health care reform, the further his numbers dropped. The country seemed caught in a time-warp. We'd been catapulted back to 2005, when another president attempted a major overhaul of the American welfare state. Then, too, the president deferred to Congress to come up with a plan. Then, too, as the president crisscrossed the nation, warning of the dangers of out-of-control entitlement spending, the public increasingly tuned him out. The innate conservatism of the American people--an instinctual resistance to sudden changes in existing social arrangements--came to the fore.

Such resistance became pronounced over the summer of 2009, when Congress went into recess and the people's representatives returned home to deal with actual people. Some of the constituents who showed up at the congressional town hall meetings behaved rudely. Some were kind of nutty. But, for better or worse, every oddball represented three or four or ten regular people who don't want to see another trillion dollars in federal spending, higher taxes, and page after page of mandates, not to mention likely cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Regular people, in other words, who recognize that the unanticipated outcomes of government activity often outweigh the wished-for ones, and that the unanticipated consequences of the Democrats' current proposals may include (a) the end of the private health insurance market and (b) government rationing of health services.