If the season of town-hall meetings has left you shell-shocked and cringing, you are not alone. Or maybe it’s the other way around: You applauded the apoplectic convulsions of the Grassroots Right and it’s I who am alone. In that case I’m in for another epistolary nuking such as I got when I defended the deportation of Elián González and some of you wrote me, “Go back to Cuba!”

Let not your heart be troubled, as Sean Hannity would say. Despite my distaste for the town-hall howlers I am in no danger of turning into an Obamamaniac. If you tried to get to the right of me you would fall off the end of the earth because, you see, it’s flat. I started out as a paleoconservative but that eventually ceased to satisfy. Paleos are comparable to the Romans of the Early Republic, but I had stopped believing in republics because they invariably degenerate into democracy, that Great Fan that everything hits sooner or later. There was only one place for me, politically and temperamentally, so I became a royalist. I believe in absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings, but other than that I’m moving left.

The conjunction of politics and temperament is the key to the personal peace of individuals, but when politics and temperament go their separate ways individuals become disturbers of the peace. A major problem I have with the Grassroots Right is all that grass. Rural people shout naturally in the course of a typical day much more than constrained people do. Making themselves heard over noisy machinery and calling bingo numbers loudly enough to reach the players in the back row, they develop habits that are made to order for political free-for-alls, but not for the 18th-century Whig salon, the cradle of classic conservatism, whose dictum was “Demolish your enemies without raising your voice.”

But people who never raise their voices remind the Grassroots Right of the boneless susurrations of elitist liberals on PBS roundtables and the wink-wink, nod-nod of their snide allusions. Therefore, quiet is bad (make that “evil”) and real men don’t allude. Actually they do, and one such allusion by an iconic conservative would have suited the Grassy Roots to a T in their war on government health care.

In 1945, when Churchill lost the post of prime minister to Labourite Clement Attlee, the two spent the transition time in close quarters. They had to use the same men’s room, but if Attlee came in while Churchill was there, Churchill left immediately, not returning until he was sure he would be alone. The socialist Attlee was amused, interpreting it as a social snub from the grandson of a duke, and asked him, “Why so modest, Winston?” Whereupon Churchill, without raising his voice, demolished him with: “Because whenever you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

Whenever the Grassroots Right sees something big, they want to deregulate it and turn it over to the private sector in the sacred name of competition because monopolies are bad (make that “evil”). But things haven’t turned out the way the deregulators of the ’80s planned. I remember when AT&T was called “the phone company,” period, because it was the only place where you could get a phone. Yes, they were a monopoly, but our bills remained the same year after year because they were a regulated monopoly. Now, the behemoths of our “communications systems” make AT&T look like a mom-and-pop store. Instead of being merely nationally big, they are now globally big, and instead of the lower rates competition was supposed to bring, they can and do charge whatever they dare because they are unregulated.

If this is the new capitalism, I’m against it. The Grassroots Right’s hatred of government regulation is a prime example of a break between politics and temperament. Liberals have a pulsating faith in mankind’s inborn capacity for progress. Rousseau preached it constantly, hammering home his pet theory that there was nothing wrong with people, it was just their institutions that made them do bad things, like price gouging. Therefore, tear down the institutions, as the French Revolution did, and people will once again be good as nature intended.

Classic conservatives take a dim view of this kind of happy talk. We are the downbeat party, prone to distrusting human nature and inclined to the Hobbesian view that man, left to his own devices, would reduce what we now call the quality of life to something “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If America promoted temperamental correctness instead of political correctness, the Grassroots Right would expect the worst of free-wheeling competitors and, backed up by their Bible-based fundamentalism, would favor strict regulation of them.

Woodrow Wilson once received a letter from a woman who asked him to repeal the law of averages. If we want to straighten out the present confused state of American conservatism, we should repeal human nature (make that “evil”). Until we do, the federal government should regulate every private sector, from “friendly” banks to health-“care” insurers, that tries any funny business.

I sympathize with the Grassroots Right in one way: Trying to blend conservatism with American folksiness is enough to make anybody start screaming in public. But what I can’t forgive is their Cult of the Book. As soon as I saw the “Ayn Rand Was Right” signs at one town-hall meeting, I knew: People who rarely read any book at all were reading Atlas Shrugged. I read it when it came out in ’57 and still remember groaning halfway through, “Okay! I get it! You can stop now!” But Rand didn’t, and the Grassy Roots didn’t. Some people read 50 books a year; others read one book 50 times, and you can always tell the difference by the pile-driving insistence on reiterating their points that they bring to town-hall meetings.