The 1920 US Census marked a historic milestone in American social history: For the first time a majority of Americans lived in urban metropolitan areas rather than in rural or small-town regions. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in the interim the migration to cities and suburbs has continued undiminished.

So why are we still allowing a demographic anomaly — people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire — to kidnap and hold for ransom our political process? Most Americans are not employed in corn manufacturing or dairy production, so why do we allow those who are to set the economic agenda in presidential elections? Iowa and New Hampshire also are not representative of America’s complex racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, so why are we allowing their interests to create the grounds for our national debate?

Instead, as Frank Bruni pointed out recently in the New York Times (“Iowa’s Harvest”), the Iowas caucus serves as a distillery of extreme right wing activism, and the pandering politicians who love them:

AS the hour of actual caucusing drew closer, Ron Paul’s campaign trumpeted his endorsement by a pastor who, as it happens, has spoken of executing homosexuals. Rick Perry pledged to devote predator drones and thousands of troops to the protection of the Mexican border, making the mission to keep every last illegal immigrant from crossing sound as urgent as rooting out terrorists in Pakistan.

And Rick Santorum, bringing his “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour to this eastern Iowa town on Thursday, promised never to be cowed by all those craven secularists who believe that a stable, healthy household needn’t be headed by a God-fearing mom and dad.

None of these three men is likely to win the Republican nomination. But before they exit stage right — stage far right, that is — they and a few of their similarly quixotic, similarly strident competitors will do no small measure of damage to the Republican Party and no great favors to the country as a whole. What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa: it befouls Republicans’ image nationally, becomes a millstone around the eventual nominee’s neck and legitimizes debate about some matters that shouldn’t be debatable.

The run-up to the Iowa caucuses, like the rest of the primary season thus far, has underscored just how much general nuttiness and moral extremism the party has come to accommodate, with Iowa serving as a theater of the conservative absurd. The state’s unrepresentative caucuses — in which a mere 100,000 or so of the most fervent voters, almost all of them white, are expected to participate — coax a Bible-thumping, border-militarizing harshness from candidates that’s a tonal turnoff to the swing voters who will probably decide the general election.

As Bruni observes, Americans generally and Democrats specifically would benefit from a reasonable, intelligent, and sane Republican party able to provide a healthy dialectic in our current moment. It’s too bad that our agrarian romanticism and small-town nostalgia, now almost a century out of touch with reality, continue to set the agenda for the national political campaign.

‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

The 2012 Republicon presidential primary campaign debuts Republicons’ new family values: Marrying the mistress with whom you were unfaithful to your previous wife.

Pictured here, serial adulterer Newt and his latest wife Callista Gingrich. (Is that necklace from Tiffany’s?)

Twenty years ago I drew the ire of the governor of Virginia.

I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. The Great Wilder, testing his presidential prospects, was traveling around the country making “policy” appearances using travel resources of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I wrote to the governor from my home address telling him that I had voted for him and that I looked to him for fiscal leadership when the state treasury was strapped, but that his travel for personal political purposes did not strike me as leading by example. A few weeks later I received the usual and accustomed letter thanking me for sharing my views.

But then several months later at a college picnic, the college’s president, a man of integrity and courage, chatting with me said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, your letter to the governor caused a bit of a stir in Richmond.” He went on to explain that the secretary of education for the commonwealth, James W. Dyke, Jr., called him to ask, What are you going to do about this employee?

My college’s president asked the secretary of education if I had written on college stationery (I hadn’t) and asked if I had written anything threatening (I hadn’t). So the president said, It sounds to me as though Mr. Long is exercising his constitutional right to free speech, and there is nothing that I am going to do about him.

I learned an important lesson: that speech, though free, may have a cost, as well as about the difference between one executive’s courage and integrity on the one hand, and another’s thin-skinned vindictiveness on the other hand.

I’m reminded of this event in my own life two decades ago (but under very similar circumstances as today) by the story of Emma Sullivan. Ms Sullivan, a high school student in Kansas, infamously tweeted on her Twitter account after a field trip to the state capital of Kansas. It is phrased in the usual vulgarly snarky idioms of adolescents and young adults: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (I don’t know what she actually said to him or if she said anything to him at all; this tweet may just be the usual trash talk to impress friends.)

Brownback’s official court minions, ever vigilant, monitor Twitter, and finding this tweet, contacted Ms. Sullivan’s Shawnee Mission East High School Principal Karl Krawitz, who called her into his office to reprimand her. According to Ms. Sullivan in the Huffington Post, the principal ”laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment . . . He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.” She also told NBC Action News that she was asked to write the governor a formal apology. Subsequent reports indicate that she has been the object of bullying by fellow students.

The Kansas governor’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, is charged with the daily monitoring of any negative comments about Brownback on social-media websites. Having rid the high schools of science, this is where Kansans spend their education time and energy.

I imagine that Ms. Sullivan has learned an important lesson about adults: We are often feckless, and will devour our young to save our skins.

My hope is that “brownback” will become a common noun as “santorum” has done: brownback, (noun): the liquified fecal discharge of the gutless , usually when scared (see colostomy, colostomy bag).

Readers of a certain age will recall George H. W. Bush’s (i.e. George I, not his idiot boy, George II) characterization of Ronald Raygun’s proposed economic policies when they both were running for the Republicon presidential nomination in 1980: “voodoo economics.” Laurie Essig has a better metaphor for it: “zombie economics.”

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Essig observes:

The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like [George] Romero’s zombies [in the movie Night of the Living Dead], continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn’t work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains. . .

But it’s 2011. Surely we should be able see neoliberal economic policies that give to the rich with the claim that it will help all of us as the monsters they are? But instead we stumble toward them, begging them to eat our brains, take our money, and make sure the super rich among us don’t pay taxes so they can continue shopping.

Republicon governor Rick Perry has declared a public day of prayer and is organizing a major national public prayer event, using the typical language of the 17th-century jeremiad: America in crisis . . . facing doom . . . must act now . . .

But what would Jesus do? Fortunately, we know without any biblical ambiguity, the ipsissima vox of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Messiah, whose Second Coming in glory Christians eagerly await:

5And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6: 5-6 [KJV])

According to Dallas News reporter Wayne Slater:

Video clips of the event’s sponsors and official endorsers cover the waterfront — claims that the Statue of Liberty is a “demonic idol,” that Oprah is the precursor of the Antichrist, that Hitler was God’s plan to get the Jews to go to Israel and that the decline in the Japanese stock market was the result of the Emperor having sex with the sun goddess. Perry has dismissed questions about the religious views of his prayer partners, saying the focus ought to be on the day of prayer and fasting, not the sponsors.

This stuff makes Glen Beck look like an Enlightenment philosophe.

OK, American; you’ve had a taste of what life under Republicons would be, and you don’t like it. As reported today, “Disapproval of Congress at Historic Level,” in the New York Times:

The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level on record and left most Americans saying that creating jobs should now take priority over cutting spending, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995. More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.

Republicans in Congress shoulder more of the blame for the difficulties in reaching a debt ceiling agreement than President Obama and the Democrats, the poll found.

The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations. The public was more evenly divided about how President Obama handled the debt ceiling negotiations: 47 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved.

The public’s opinion of the Tea Party movement has soured in the wake of the debt ceiling debate. The Tea Party is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll. In mid-April only 29 percent of those polled viewed the movement unfavorably, while 26 percent viewed it favorably. And 43 percent of Americans now think the Tea Party has too much influence on the Republican Party, up from 27 percent in mid-April.

Buyers’ remorse.

Now, please remember this in November 2012.

George Packer, writing in the 25 July 2011 New Yorker:

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”–between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Denizens of erotic culture and aficionados of American slang will know that “tea bagging” is the term of art for the practice of a man’s inserting his scrotum into the mouth of a sexual partner for the purpose of deriving pleasure. This sexual feat is sometimes performed (and photographically documented) while the passive party is asleep or unconscious as a result of drugs or alcohol. It serves as an apposite metaphor of the politics of so-called tea-party Republicons.

The Republicon-controlled House of Representatives has just passed a pointless piece of self-pleasuring legislation (that will not be endorsed by the Senate or signed the President), which further brings the “full faith and credit” of the US into jeopardy. This legislative scrotum shoved into the mouth of the Senate will soon be spat out, leaving the rest of us with its pubic hairs lodged between our teeth.

The Weeper of the House, who discovered his cojones before dandling them over the Senate, is fond of pontificating about “the American People,” whose will he claims to hear and to heed. What he has neither heard nor heeded is that the vast majority of Americans are concerned about the recession, jobs, and improving the federal balance sheet by increasing revenues (restoring Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy). They are not as concerned about the deficit in principle, at least at this time, when economic growth has slowed and joblessness persists, and they are absolutely opposed to assaults on the safety nets of Social Security and Medicare.

Meanwhile, Republicrats on the other side of the aisle and the Republicrat in the White House, have been drooling and wetting their panties to get some action in the deficit-reduction gang bang. But, like most virgins, they were diffident and ambivalent. “Yes, but, no, but, maybe. . . ” Mr. Obama, we needed you to convene a Blue Ribbon Jobs Taskforce, not a deficit reduction circle jerk.

Washington’s onanism deafens its politicians to the voices of the rest of us, who are too tired or too busy to get it up. One begins to understand the despair and rage of the alienated.

James Fallows, writing on the Atlantic Monthly Web site, “Another Chart for Your Debt Ceiling Discussions,” graphically displays our current debt crisis:

“. . . the Bush-era tax cuts, extended last year under Obama, were the biggest single policy source of deficit increase over the past ten years. Therefore you can be for reducing deficits, or you can be for preserving the tax cuts, but you cannot rationally be for both. . . . insisting on both is the current House Republican view.”