The Tipping Point

Instapundit points to Edward Cline of Capitalism Magazine, who thinks the backlash against the looters and the elite may be real.

...one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

The Americans who recently protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its columnists and editors, nor with the news media.

So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger.

Cline may be on to something and it may be spreading beyond the hinterlands. The other day, while riding to work on the A train, I noticed a hip-looking type, in his late twenties perhaps, thoroughly engrossed reading Atlas Shrugged. This was in Manhattan, mind you. I've never seen a sight like that before.

We'll know for sure genuine "change" is in the offing when anguished and furious denunciations of  it, decrying it as "neo-fascism" (or the like), begin appearing in the New York Times and left-wing blogs.