Mr. Worldy Wise Man and Ms. Smooth-it-Away are all over the airwaves, internet, and op ed pages, cautioning us against panicking and reminding us that there are no easy solutions. Pardon me, but I'd like a little something... harsher than that.

Or course, we shouldn't panic. When did anyone on PBS or CNN or even Fox ever say we should? And, sure, there are no easy solutions. But doesn't saying so again and again, and leaving it at that, beg the question of which of the several hard, complex solutions we ought to choose; which lines we ought to draw in the sand; and who we - I mean we, the American republic -- ought to be willing to make really, really angry by choosing?

What if I suggested, from my position of almost breathtaking financial ignorance and vulnerability, that any hard, complex, effective, just, economy-boosting solution will have to make a lot of newly wealthy people really, really angry?

What if I suggested that it will have to do that because so much of the American financial system has been fleecing honest but credulous people by making other honest, credulous people -- those poor mortgage-telemarketers who ruined our dinner hours last year, or my recent Yale students who've been rowing in the galleys of big investment banks -- complicit in the cheating, because that seemed the only way they could get ahead or just get by?

Would you agree with me if I said all that? Or would you agree instead.with Lady DeRothschild, Lawrence "Cuddles' Kudlow, David Brooks, the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal, and all the other Mr. Worldly Wise Men and Ms. Smooth-it-Aways, who would say that I have just engaged in gauche class warfare?

If you agreed with them instead of me, you'd have a lot more company than I do in the chattering classes and, truth to tell, in America itself. The problem I face is that many millions of Americans actively want to be misled by the Smooth-it Aways.They want to be told that their enemies are aliens, not fellow-Americans (and that even if some of their fellow-Americans are enemies, they, like Barack Obama, are really aliens.)

Yes, alas: The problem is not that so many pundits and the McCain/Palin ticket are deflecting the hard truth so brazenly, even though that's what they're doing. The problem is that so few people care. Those of us who do care can't just try to "set them straight" with questions and answers like mine. We'll have to dig deeper, and quickly, to find out why people actively want to be lied to.

There have been some books about this lately, as there were in the 1930s and '40s, and then in the '50s; but I can't remember them. I do know that fear and avoidance of hard solutions are obvious candidates.

Another candidate -- the one that's being peddled by the actual candidates of the Republican ticket -- is resssentiment, - a fine-spun rage borne of fitfully acknowledged feelings of inferiority and powerlessness that seek a target, the more distant the better. It's a stew of rancor, vengeful animosity, and self-doubt among people who've forgotten what it even feels like to take constructive action forthrightly. They'd rather hate than haul and hope..

I've never been a big fan of Thomas Frank's argument that people who keep boosting their oppressors by voting against the false enemies they're shown on Fox News are all being bamboozled out of recognizing their true interests. Here, too, it's more complex than that.

People I know experience and process economic setbacks and injustices morally, by doubting themselves first. Only later do they seek false targets when conditions and demagogues have really scared them into it. At that point, what they want to be shown is Evil, not Sarah Palin's bridge to nowhere or John McCain's latest flip-flop.

Mr. Worldly Wise Man and Ms. Smooth-it-Away are as worried about this danger as I am. They don't want class-warfare from the right - that is, fascism, drenched in ressentiment - any more than they want it from the left (that is, from me and a few others who sometimes sound as if it could ever happen.) They want to hold the old fleecing system together, so that they can go on swathing it in bromides, jokes and tooting celebrations of national greatness, as they always used to do, to great acclaim.

The problem is, they can't do it now. They are riding riptides of rage and despair they don't know how to navigate. They're getting as worried as John Adams, an architect of our republic, was in the 1780s, when he warned:

"When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. ... The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."

The smooth-it-aways are becoming as uneasy as those of us who were trained and committed all our lives to make liberal/rational arguments that are persuasive empirically and logically. In this crisis and campaign, our work has no traction with what a growing proportion of Americans have become under the corporate-consumer juggernaut that has been uprooting, subverting, and dissolving the civic-republican culture.

The more intelligent of the apologists for that juggernaut are beginning to feel just a little like the social critics of Frankfurt School in the Weimar Republic of 1932. And they don't know where to turn, besides warning against "easy solutions" that would actually be hard because they'd involve choosing the "wrong" side, at least for awhile, to put the greedy encroachers back in their place.