Is Ann Coulter an anti-Semite? What’s interesting to me about Coulter’s notorious tweet (“How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”) isn’t what it does or doesn’t reveal about her, but the light that it sheds on the deep archetypes of American conservatism.
Watching the two Republican debates, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d come, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, “unstuck in time.” Ted Cruz looks to me like a silent movie villain from the 1920s, and he talks like a wax cylinder recording of a Texas governor from the 1920s. Jeb Bush is, well, another Bush. Mike Huckabee is a beefier, more homespun Pat Robertson. And for all that he is a product of New York real estate and reality TV, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the rural Populism that arose in the late 19th century.