There is no institution more incessantly powerful in America today than the media, especially the many television and cable networks, but also the six or seven print and online organs that shape elite opinion. Most people in the media are considerably more secular than the nation's centrist voters, and also more pro-government, which leads to a certain blindness in our elites. They think the nation is more secular — a good deal more secular — than it is. They tend to favour the "reforming" progressive state over the business sector. They are the cheerleaders of the secular political state. They have loved Obama with an unparalleled love.

Yet this powerful institution has no ear for the music of popular outrage from the broad middle, and no ear for the music of America's religious vitality. As Tocqueville shrewdly observed, there are many things that the law allows Americans to do that their religious convictions prevent them from doing. Even under the heavy pressure of media-supported secularisation, the broad American middle-class is far more Christian in conviction and more loyal to the founding principles of the Republic than are the glitterati. 

Most in the media, it seems, have a visceral distaste for the good folks who in unorganised but potent fashion called into being the Tea Party movement: the broad swell of public opinion against insupportable deficits and ever higher taxes on success. Much of the public feeling really does call to mind Boston in 1773 — weary of their political leadership, the first Tea Party supplied on their own the decisive signal of rebellion.

Similarly, still out of sight, a group of very successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who are part of the new class of highly educated, proficient and visionary evangelicals, are together putting up several million dollars to help kindle a revolt among those in the churches who have been hitherto unpolitical. Their aim is to inspire and register five million new voters among evangelicals.