I’d taken measure of the talk and silences of public life in the heartland of the right. I’d seen what my Tea Party friends were putting up with. But the empathy wall was higher than I’d imagined. I could see what they couldn’t see, but not—as Yogi Berra might say—what I couldn’t see. I still felt blind to what they saw and honored. I needed to do something else, to enter the social terrain that surrounded and influenced them. Included in that were industry, state government, the church, and the press. How did these basic institutions influence their feelings about life? I thought I would
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