I have two deeply contrasting books on my shelf right now, but they both base their premises similarly: Life doesn't make much sense at all and seems to only be getting worse in that regard. These two books, the recently re-issued Quest For Community by the conservative intellectual and founding dean of the University of California at Riverside, Robert Nisbet, and Rules for Radicals by the leftist Saul D. Alinsky, a preeminent boogeyman of the right wing. I recommend you read both.

Despite being written decades ago, both books are very useful in understanding our modern times, which do reflect the past but also show a tide from the Tea Party movement and the Right that is distinctly unique in flavor. Alinsky contrasts the confused youth, who see that there can only be a distinct break from the corruption of the past and creation of a new order, with the equally confused older generation, who looks back upon the past with a fondness that often defies reality.

Nisbet, on the other hand, recognizes the chaos and alienation as well, but pinpoints the confusion on the erosion of the guilds, churches and associations that people formed before the modern state came in and did away with them.

This is where it is important to understand conservatism and what it is. Despite his adoration of capitalization and exultation of the works of Ayn Rand, Fox News television host Glenn Beck is very much reacting against globalization. His response appears very much insane and erratic - skits in which he adorns leiderhosen and stands on top of a table, talking in a Kermit the Frog voice, filling his set with random puppets and incomprehensible chalkboards that look like they were stolen from the set of A Beautiful Mind - but there is a reason, beyond mere spectacle, that Beck brings in millions of viewers. The attached video of him speaking about a small town, which he compares to his native Mt. Vernon, Washington, that has been abandoned after DHL moved 9500 jobs from its 12,000 person population reflects this populist backlash against globalization. 

There is a book, called Derborence, written by the Swiss French writer Ramuz that I think encapsulates in a literary form the dynamic we see it today's politics. A small village, with seclusion from the rest of the world reinforced by a large mountain, finds itself suddenly shaken to its core when a massive amount of men are killed after the mountain erupts, or as the villagers say, "the mountain fell." What Bill O'Reilly calls the assault on the "white Christian male power structure" by the Left and the dominance of the U.S.A. in all matters political and economic being shaken to its core by failing wars, economic turmoil and the rise of powers like India and China is the mountain. Tea party ralliers, freshmen Republicans and Glenn Beck are the villagers of Derborence, trying to figure out what this cataclysmic shift is and how to deal with it.

CuriousLurker, a friend of mine who blogs at Little Green Footballs, has said that while the technology of human beings has evolved at an incredible rate, our minds are still stuck where they were thousands of years ago. One thousand years ago, someone would likely be born into a village, know everyone in his village and die surrounded by all those he knew. The longing for this sort of familiarity and stability is still in the back of people's minds, no matter how much the background and panorama of our lives has changed.

If you look at most social crises in the past centuries, CuriousLurker's explanation fits to a tee. Regional and tribal warfare was a constant throughout human history, but with the colonization of the American continents, a whole new dynamic was created in which cultures from throughout the world culminated into one land mass. African slaves were forced to be part of this enterprise and Native Americans were inculcated into it. 

On top of that, the United States was founded as the governing basis of most of North America. The US created a peculiar immigrant based society in which people from all over the world would come and contribute. Cultural cross fertilization is rampant throughout America. One needs only to turn on the TV to see it, where you'll see Japanese animation broadcast in English or a film like Slumdog Millionare, produced in India with a completely India-based plot and cast, winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.

However, once one leaves the living room and crosses into the city, self-segregation becomes evident. In the twenty first century, the most liberal cities have neighborhoods that are primarily Asian, primarily white or primarily black. It's not a nefarious conspiracy but the habit of an old conservatism that is still within all of us. People seek out community because it is necessary, but when that community is enforced (as it was by bussing programs in my native Seattle which did little to solve core problems of inequality), everything becomes messed up.

With globalization and an economic crisis that has shaken the United States to its core, it actually makes perfect sense that many Americans would react irrationally and with anger. The United States has always been a fluid, chaotic experiment and conservatism seems to have developed as a counter-weight to that. Whereas European states were often founded with national identity and dogma written in, identity and religion were something that individual Americans had to find themselves. They've done this by choosing to live in progressive cities or conservative towns, becoming Mormon, Unitarian, agnostic or Methodist. 

Perhaps this is why there has been an outburst of attacks on Muslims and mosques throughout the country now, whereas there were few after 9/11. With a foreign attack on American shores, the United States was actually filling into an old role that was not only familiar but comfortable. (World War II has been for generations the symbol of America at its best.) Now, however, nothing seems proudly American. Those wars in the Middle East seem endless and meaningless, just as everything else in public American life does. 

What is the solution? There are no solutions. In a world of chaos and anarchy, people need to find their own meaning. This is a difficult, arduous process. I think that the solution within all of us was best summed up by the Colombian intellectual Nicolas Gomez Davila, who said, "Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems."