One of the fantasies promulgated by conservative wingnuts is that suburban Americans are mostly conservatives who believe in "convention and respectability" and who have "a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order."
The conservative fantasy is that such people do not want change.
Part of the fantasy derives from the myth that suburbanites are "patio people" who live in $500,000 houses with five bedrooms and a three-car garage, who pay a maintenance outfit to groom their lawns, clean their pools and patios, and who on weekends, when they have nothing to do but spend money, like to visit upscale gadget shops in their upscale malls (think Greenwich, Connecticut or Northbrook, Illinois) to buy $500 adult toys that make them feel technologically au courant.
Without question, if you're an upscale American burgher you would rather your comfort not be disturbed.
The problem with the conservative fantasy is that most suburban Americans do not live in upscale comfort but live close enough to the interface between the middle class and the lower class to be frightened by any trend that suggests they may fall down a financial chute into a black hole of despair.
It is no accident that at the moment 80 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. They can sense it. They can feel it. And if they bother to look at charts and statistics and graphs of what's been happening to them during the past eight years, they know the reality of their situation.
Conservative wingnuts -- their heads stuffed with the ideological platitudes of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke and Herbert Spencer, platitudes embellished by home-grown berries ranging from Friedrich Hayek to Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman -- imagine their ideology as a religion good for any time, anywhere, and for anyone.
Increasing taxes of the rich is un-American, they say. Maybe tomorrow they will tell us that increasing taxes of the rich is un-Christian.
Our conservative wingnuts are essentially conservative fundamentalists -- and as dangerous to the public good as any fundamentalists anywhere. They promote their creed of greed irrespective of its consequences to the public. They promoted their creed of greed in the 1920s -- and provoked the Great Depression. They promoted their creed of greed in the 1980s -- and provoked the crash of 1987. They promoted their creed of greed during the past eight years -- and provoked the current collapse of the international financial system.
As always the fat cats and sharks and big players walk away richer -- with everyone else collateral damage in the exercise of greed.
The Palin-McCain duet tells us they will be a new breed of Republican -- against Wall Street, against greed, mavericks for the working class. If that's true, why are they Republicans at all? When, in the past 100 years, have the Republicans ever represented anything but the big-business class?
As Adolf the Mad said, "The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
The idea that the Palin-McCain vaudeville team is for the working class is a big lie.
America has two weeks to its crossroad. Palin-McCain hacks and shills will do their best to rouse the idiot white supremacist rabble against the prospect of a half-black president. Will they succeed or fail? The last time we had a crossroad like this one was 1932. There is no room for doubt about the consequences of this election.
Meanwhile, the real people of the suburbs, most of them living in cheap houses with tiny rooms and a one-car garage (or just a parking space at the side of the house) are beginning to realize that maybe the fat cats downtown have squeezed them dry and left them to fall down a chute.