DO PEOPLE REALLY CHANGE? You might be tempted to think that, despite her long history of rightwing lunacy, The Anchoress is onto something as she rather surprisingly comes out for fair trade in chocolate and less exploitative working conditions for the folks who bring it to us. She's seen some heart-tugging videos, you see.

Go back a few posts, though, and you'll see she's still on about the flash mobs Obama is using to bring socialist revolution to America. Those of us who follow her know she'll be back at that popsicle stand soon, possibly tomorrow.

So what caused her current hiccup? Besides disturbances in her brain chemistry, I mean. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it were the Occupy Wall Street stuff. While the regular kind of functionaries are furiously denouncing the damn dirty hippies, the volunteers are more prone to sentiment. (Which is why the functionaries often try to pull them back in line by telling them that the revolutionaries are actually hurting the common people.) Maybe The Anchoress has picked up on the general mood of uplift and social justice, and though she can't get with all this share-the-wealth crap, it may have softened her soul sufficiently that when someone showed her a sob story she thought, o let's be mad! In another era she'd be choking up to "The Impossible Dream" and wondering if maybe she shouldn't just go ahead and put on that Humphrey for President button. Later, of course, she'd be cheering the hardhats.

You can see it more plainly in Rod Dreher, who is in a mood, too:

You know, whenever I hear an American politician, especially a Republican one, denounce “class warfare,” I roll my eyes. What Rand Paul is doing here is implying that any questioning of the way our system distributes rewards is an expression of crypto-Marxism. Is this kind of thing really of no interest to Sen. Paul?

But Dreher is more hapless than The Anchoress; he doesn't have the same kind of sudden dissociative breaks; he has to talk himself into things, often in public. So further down he starts talking about culture war, and after some traveling music about Sarah Palin et alia...

Though liberals refuse to concede it, this line of attack doesn’t come from nowhere. What is invisible to so many on the left is as plain as day to conservatives: the liberal cultural overclass in this country looks down on their values. Candidate Obama’s gaffe in which he condescended to explain conservatives to liberal donors as “bitter” people who cling to God and guns blah blah blah...

Also, liberals recreate themselves by "yelling, 'Bigotry!' in its various forms (e.g., 'Racist! Sexist! Anti-gay! Anti-Catholic! Islamophobe!') at anyone who points it out that there’s something really disordered about their behavior." Rudely disordered! So there you have it: Everyone under the top one percent is getting screwed, but some prig on Fifth Avenue sneered at the salt of the earth -- see, it all balances out.

These have been the observations of an old man who has seen a few surges of popular enthusiasm in his time, and has seen what they came to. By which I mean, kids: don't get your hopes up.