Jacob Weisberg pretty much nails it...

...with his piece in Slate (and Newsweek), "The Right's New Left: The Tea Party movement has two defining traits: status anxiety and anarchism" (my emphasis):

Nostalgia, resentment, and reality-denial are all expressions of the same underlying anxiety about losing one's place in the country or of losing control of it to someone else. When you look at the surveys, the Tea Partiers are not primarily the victims of economic transformation, but rather people whose position is threatened by social change. Because racial bias is unacceptable both in American political culture and in an individualist ideology, Tea Partiers don't say directly what Pat Buchanan used to: that moving from a predominantly white Christian nation to a majority nonwhite one is a bad thing and should be stopped. Instead, their resistance finds sublimated expression through their reality distortion field: Beck's claim that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred of white people" or Dinesh D'Souza's Newt-endorsed theory that Obama is a Kenyan Mau Mau in mufti, or the prevalent Tea Party opinion that policies like Obamacare and the stimulus are merely mechanisms for transferring income from the middle class to the minority poor and illegal immigrants—i.e., socialism. Of no previous movement has Richard Hofstadter's depiction of populism as driven by "status anxiety" been so apt.

I'm a big believer that politics, especially in a heterogeneous country like the United States, is all about different "tribes" competing for scarce resources. For most of American history -- who are we kidding? For all of it -- white Christians have been the prime beneficiary of the governing structure. And they like it that way. (Who wouldn't?)

But being human, they are constantly fighting off fear. And one of their greatest fears is that some day they will fall from the top of the food chain. So if a politician, like President Obama -- who doesn't look, act or speak like them -- isn't seen to be working 24/7 on behalf of their group, they get scared -- real scared, real fast. (I think that's why Bush remained popular with 30% or so of the country right up until the very end -- despite his disastrous presidency. He was seen -- correctly -- as the unshakable champion of white Christians.) Throw in a deep recession and some fear-mongers and resentment-stokers and you've got the tea party movement.

Recently, Glenn Beck said, "I wouldn't be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and firehoses are released or opened on us."

And I just want to ask Mr. Beck, by whom? The government, the establishment? You -- white Christians -- are the establishment. You're the ones holding the firehoses!