ABSTRACT
The common substratum seems to lie in the tendency to polarization that derives from the main pattern of developmental change in American society. As regards international relations, this individualism romanticizes our earlier lack of involvement in the complex world of power relations, when America could be left to work out its own destiny. Most generally perhaps this individualism is the idealization of pristine simplicity as against organizational and other complexity. The good life is to be completely untamed by the disciplines of complex society. From the point of view of this individualism, the income tax is a "tribute" exacted by a "foreign" usurper; namely, the urban, and more or less European, America. The central focus of it seems to be the political rear-guard action of the rural and small-town elements in the society, which have been able to "dig in," above all through legislative refusal to redistrict, first for the House of Representatives, but even more for the state legislature.
