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Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.

Over the years the federal government has become the powerful central government the Anti-Federalists feared. Issues such as mandatory health care, expanding welfare programs, government takeover of private industry and an insurmountable national debt created by our elected representatives have Tea Party members as mad as hornets.

One state has taken a more defiant approach. Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock essentially dared opponents to sue the state, vowing to continue enforcing restrictions on corporate political spending that date back to scandals involving mining interests nearly a century ago. Testifying before Congress in February, Bullock said the state's corporate spending limit "has served us well and never been challenged."

To the extent that the legislative triumphs of the New Deal and Great Society are held up as inspirational examples in assessing what the Obama administration has achieved, one should also remember the structural advantages that Roosevelt and Johnson had in putting their programs through, and the help that they received, willing and unwilling, from political and social movement leaders who were beyond their control.

Southern Pacific was hardly the only corporation to invoke the Bill of Rights in the name of deregulation, Bakan points out; although the law had been added to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War, only 19 individuals invoked it for protection between 1890 and 1910. Businesses, on the other hand, claimed 14th Amendment protection 288 times during that period. A 1976 Supreme Court case, Buckley v. Valeo, explicitly ruled that political donations were free speech and constitutionally protected.

David Brooks’s column about populism (“The Populist Addiction,” Jan. 26) depicts the sorry tradition of us-versus-them demagogy in American history. But there is a different tradition of democratic populism, based on the view that while leaders like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln play noteworthy roles, it takes ordinary citizens to “build America.”

We have one party that is severely compromised by its ties to big money, and another party that is just plain nuts. There is no other way to parse it. According to recent polls, a majority of its followers either believe that President Obama was born in Kenya or aren’t sure, believe there is no such thing as global warming, believe that the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61 percent!). The only bright side is that according to a recent Pew poll, only 23 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, which makes them not only a fringe in beliefs but also, thankfully, in numbers.

Kevin Mount, a freshman from Dorchester at the South Boston Education Complex, said he was certain that the attacks were not the result of a conspiracy.

He said they were all a coincidence that the government used as an excuse for attacking the Taliban.

Asked where he learned that theory, he said, “From the street.’’

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The origins of the ban lie in the 1896 presidential race, which pitted the Republican William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, the farm-belt populist. Bryan was a peerless orator, but McKinley had Mark Hanna — the premier political operative of his day — extracting so-called assessments from the nation’s biggest corporations and funneling them into a vast marketing campaign.