The Tea Partiers represent an enraged class of white men that feel like they are seeing society change in ways they don’t like. We’ve seen this before, at the end of the Civil War and in the 1950s Jim Crow South. Now investigative reporter Robert Parry (who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for Newsweek and AP) sees the same fury at things not going their way by the same political demographic. This is something actually new in history, though: members of congress throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the Constitution. Could this shutdown and hostage taking threat to the world economy be the white man’s last tantrum?