This article surveys changes at the economic, philosophic, social and political levels to argue that a new agenda for educational policy is taking place in the western world, particularly in the UK and the USA. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason-romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane.

Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film.

Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy.

In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. The wrong response to Tea Party fundamentalism is to respond in kind and simply hunker down in an alternative belief system. The wilder versions of antiprogressivism advanced by Beck and the less cautious scholars who influenced him have obscured and overtaken a more nuanced critique within conservatism, one that liberals would do well to take seriously.

The fourth section discusses how this fundamentalist perspective on the nation's history, and on President Obama's place in it, has more than its share of outright lunacy. The third section investigates why the attack on Progressivism was so avidly embraced by Tea Party conservatives at this precise time, how it provided a coherent story of America and, with that, the emotional energy needed to mobilize an already historically inflected movement. The second section examines how this critique exploded into broader circulation within the conservative movement. It explains how the ideas of these political thinkers spread through the conservative movement, with particular attention to the Heritage Foundation as a central node of the network, and how it came to be available when the opportunity for wider dissemination opened. This chapter first traces the roots of the stylized history of Progressivism's role in American liberalism found in the pronouncements of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party to a small cadre of conservatives grouped around the Claremont Institute, with the political philosopher Charles Kesler at its center.

Hyena agenda