Dayuhan,
To go back to your question about fear of government, I think the other major trend, of which arguably desegragation was a part, is the rapid urbanization of the country since World War II. It's not so much that the rural countryside has depopulated, but that metropolitan regions, particularly on the coast, have grown so rapidly that rural America has not kept pace. Like I mentioned in the previous post, this dramatic shift in America's social structure from a rural society to an urban one has not fully translated into a proportionate shift in political power where the rural communities still retain disproportionate representation in Congress. You could probably draw the political faultline on most issues (affirmative action, civil equality, social programs, abortion, and so on) along this cultural rift. And not only are the cultures and values different, but so are the political mechanisms in the exercise of power - rural America has more "responsive" government, in one narrowly defined sense, but this often comes at the exclusion of the 'Other'; in rural America, racial and sometimes religious minorities. That's what the federal government destroyed by dismantling desegregation, the effects of which still undermine the South's economic development.
So when we as a country finally get to the election of Barack Obama, what does he represent? He's a self-made, well-educated, internationally travelled, biracial-American from a large city, none of which earn him any favors from rural America. And it's been rural America that has determined political outcomes for centuries until Obama broke the southern strategy in his first election by focusing on youth and minority outreach. That's a significant achievement given the course of US history. Is it sustainable? My thought is that 2014 mid-terms will be the last gasp of a extinguishing political class. The last two presidential elections demonstrated just how little of America that class actually represents - they will have to find a new strategy since the southern strategy is no longer sustainable. And that means minority and youth outreach, and that also means addressing the issues and values reflected in urban communities and making compromises on rural issues in order to build a national coalition.
Put in the context of your question, those changes represent significant threats to the dominant social norms and order, which intensified the already skeptical (fearful?) disposition of rural America towards the metropolitan 'other'. The Republican Party attempted to mobilize this agitation into favorable political results. Remember, the Tea Party emerged not as a response to Obamacare but to the bank and corporate bailouts at the end of the Bush administration as the economy collapsed, throwing rural communities into chaos. And since then, the GOP has been struggling to maintain its control over the movement's adherents who tend to be very active on the local political scene. And this culminated in shutdown of the government last year and essentially the stoppage of work in the House for the last 2 years, but also into the failure to win the last presidential election since, after all, the Tea Party only represents a narrow rural minority.
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