(RNS) From 33,000 feet, America seems a peaceful land.

All this room, all these people growing crops and working in factories and offices, trying their best to build families and to make their brief spans worthwhile.

At ground level, however, we encounter a more disturbing picture.

At the airport in Corpus Christi, Texas, I listened to a young Tea Party activist explain why she felt trivialized by mainstream politicians. Citizens of all persuasions could identify with that sentiment. But then she launched into a warmed-over 1950s Red Scare and voiced a nostalgic vision of an America without color, complexity or disagreement.

At Dallas-Fort Worth, news reports had former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin placing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. Another described the posting of Democratic lawmakers’ home addresses on a Web site, along with an implied suggestion that someone ought to use their Second Amendment rights against these apostates.

A leading congressman suggested that targets of bigoted assaults deserved what they got. He seemed unconcerned by the menacing leap from opposing health care reform to spitting on blacks, gays and Jews.

Meanwhile, centrists go into hiding, lest they, too, become targets of rage, and leaders who could chart a path forward are competing for podium time at the next anti-everything rally.

This is serious business. This isn’t just another odd phase in America’s experiment with democracy. The forces being unleashed could paralyze democracy with constant bullying and refusal to compromise, and could encourage nuts with guns to fire at will.

It is dangerous for the entire nation when the forces of hatred and bigotry are told they are the true patriots.

Some centrists hope the economy will improve quickly enough to ease the worry that we see expressed in rituals of rage. They hope the actual benefits of health care reform and financial reform will expose misinformation.

Personally, I don’t think this rage is about health care, taxes, unemployment or Wall Street greed.

It is about a world that has become too complex to be easily understood.

It is about European-heritage whites on the brink of becoming a minority.

It is about the feelings of personal inadequacy that arise in a service economy when people don’t make things with their hands, but instead take small, poorly paid roles in complex processes that make someone else rich. It’s the new feudalism.

It is about nostalgia for the 1950s, without actually studying that tumultuous decade and how bigotry and demagoguery almost won.

It is about an uneasy sense that America’s moment has passed, without studying how our economic and political leaders’ refusal to accept change and complexity actually undermined the nation’s economic and political vitality.

Many Americans, probably a majority, have cause to feel dismay, dislocation and unease. While conservatives rally to Tea Party groups, equally alienated liberals form Coffee Parties. In a rational moment, Tea and Coffee folks would find their common ground and join forces against entrenched do-nothings and lobbyists’ lapdogs.

The more likely scenario, sad to say, is that dismay will turn to rage, dislocation to bigotry and unease to violence. The cowardly act of spitting on a black congressman could seem minor compared to what comes next.

Like business leaders who manage quarter-to-quarter and sacrifice everything for stock prices, political leaders take a short-sighted gamble on rituals of rage and fail to imagine the danger they are unleashing.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)