The Antagonists

Why we're in trouble:

• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast on the enmity between (large numbers of) Republicans and (an awful lot of) Americans.
• Yves Smith at naked capitalism features a brief video segment on the failure of Occupy to become a mass political movement.
• Also from Yves Smith:  Banks are above rules.  In certain matters, anyway.
• ETA:  Dave Neiwert at Orcinus on "secessionist" movements and some more America-hating.  A taste, because he's not kidding:

  This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently and most of all who think differently from them.
  They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.
  
  Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain, "This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter suppression by conservative Republicans.
  
  And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to drop out.

It turns out, by the way, that I know someone who voted for Romney. (We all got rather too enthusiastically anti-conservative.)  Oh, well.