To see that, just look at what that movement's leading figures said and did during the Clinton years. In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that "just about every military man" believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard." The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible "murder" of Vince Foster. Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker. Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating "Whitewater," a "scandal" which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define. When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of "wagging the dog" -- trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal). And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal -- in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique "distinguishing" spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child. More intense and constant attacks on a President's "legitimacy" are difficult to imagine...For the most part, this is my view. As I've said, I'm not convinced that Joe Wilson wouldn't have yelled "You lie!" at President Hillary Clinton, or President John Edwards. I'm also not sure that "Birther-ism" is more sinister than alleging that Clinton murdered Vince Foster. For the most part, think that Obama is facing what any Democrat would face at this point in history--which if you're black, is the problem.
Other than the fact that Obama's race intensifies the hatred in some precincts, nothing that the Right is doing now is new. This is who they are and what they do -- and that's been true for many years, for decades. Even the allegedly "unprecedented" behavior at Obama's speech isn't really unprecedented; although nobody yelled "you lie," Republicans routinely booed and heckled Clinton when he spoke to Congress because they didn't think he was legitimately the President (only for Ted Koppel to claim that it was something "no one at this table has ever heard before" when Democrats, in 2005, booed Bush's Social Security privatization proposal during a speech to Congress).
It's worth noting that a lot of Clinton's troubles, and a lot of any generic national Democratic troubles post-1968, are inextricably tied to race. Clinton was a Southerner, and as such, there was some hope that could help reclaim white Southern votes that had left the Democrats after 1968. Why did these white Southerners leave, in the first place? What was the exact nature of the shoals Clinton had to navigate? It's worth thinking about the efficacy of the Sista Souljah move, and who that tactic was targeting. It's worth thinking about Ricky Ray Rector. It's worth thinking about the growth of the militia movement during Clinton's presidency, and exactly what sort of person these groups were enlisting. It's worth remembering Randy Weaver, and exactly what he stood for.
Let me not be reductive--Clinton stood at the center of a cultural conflict stretching back to the 60s and involving everything from gay rights to the nature of the military. I don't have any means of apportioning how much of that hostility had to do with race, and how much of it had to do with all the issues brought forth by the 60s. But much of what looks to just be vanilla issues (crime, welfare, taxes etc.) were suffused with the politics of race. I think Obama benefited by the passage of time, and the fact that crime and welfare, aren't national issues, at the moment. But as Glenn notes, the standard craziness has been intensified by Obama's race.
There's a danger in making that last point too casually--"Yes race is a factor, but..." The crazy-tax is intensified by Obama's blackness--that his blackness didn't invent the crazy-tax doesn't mitigate the point. We all have to visit the dentist every six months, not because of racial discrimination, but because we're human. But if the dentist charges black people five dollars more per-visit, pointing out that twenty years ago I couldn't even go to the dentist, or that "Racism doesn't cause tooth decay," won't make me feel much better. And it shouldn't--I'm still getting ripped off.
If we concede, as most reasonable people do, that racism is a factor--not the factor but a factor--in resistance to Obama, then in fact, what we've seen this year is, by the very nature of an Obama presidency, nprecedented. Put simply, we've seen the crazy-tax, of which race is a portion, before. But we've never seen the crazy-tax intensified by race. We have not seen it accompanied by watermelon jokes, by Congressmen referring to him as boy, by clucking heads claiming that the president "has exposed himself as someone with a deep-seated hated of white people." We've never seen the whitey tape, before.
There's a tendency to lump anti-black racism in with all the serious problems presented when you try to make a democracy work. There is always a danger of becoming single-minded, of bringing to bear a myopic analysis which sees one thing in everything. Moreover, watermelon jokes are a long way from red-lining, and in seeing how far we've come, the temptation is to dismiss how far we have to go.But from a black perspective, it's a temptation you can ill-afford. Racism cost us dollars a half-century ago. Today it costs us quarters--but it still costs.
Don't let the grinding familiarity of Obama blind you to the profound times we live in, and the work that's still left to do. We've never had a black president before. This is without precedent. We've also never had anti-Semitic white supremacists shooting up the Holocaust Museum. This, too, is unprecedented.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
This is what I've been trying to get across to those conservatives I know who are defending Wilson against charges of racism for his shouting--some get it, some don't, as is always the case. It all depends on how willing they are to actually talk about race and privilege.
Excellent discussion of how far we've come/how far still to go. Everyone has a tax. As you point out with the Holocaust Museum, there is a Jewish tax. Hillary has a woman tax. Bush has a Texan, rich white boy tax which late night comedians used relentlessly. We each are members of a group that is, to one degree or another, stereotyped and downplayed. But the black tax comes with a long and shameful history and even if it someday becomes no more costly than the dumb blonde tax, the interest owed for centuries of overpayment need to be payed.
I agree that any Democratic president will necessarily be subject to this. (As this TPM reader who talked to some protesters Saturday noted, Nixon's Southern strategy seems alive and well in much of the opposition.)
I just want to add one thing re: Hillary. If Joe Wilson had shouted "You lie!" at President Hillary Clinton, I would suspect that his Southern white male self might be exhibiting a few signs of status anxiety over the first female president. This couldn't and shouldn't be easily reduced down to sexism, but it would certainly be in the mix, just as racism is with Obama.
Question: how many in the media (a) said on election night that the election of an African-American President was an historic achievement that represented a milestone event in American society, and (b) deny that race has anything to do with the right's behavior towards Obama?
Seems to me that it's kinda hard to maintain both positions simultaneously.
Is that the 1960s or the 1860s?
Accepting your point that the president's race presents a new kind of obstacle, I do think it's important to still wait and ask in what context things are actually worse. The president is black. That in itself is unprecedented. The fact that he's black clearly creates new obstacles. No one should rest on this point. Or, as you say, state it too casually.
Still, I think it's important to draw the clear distinction between what is with or without precedent and what is literally worse. Now, we may accept that race is a factor in how the president is being treated, but is he being treated literally worse than any president in recent history. Is the level of vitriol with which he's being treated unprecedented? Or does the fringe right simply have an unprecedented motivation to spew bile?
I mean, the current economic climate is almost without precedent. The financial and auto bailouts are without recent precedent. The question, I think, is whether they're using new reasons to be the same em-effers they are everytime a popular Democratic president is elected into office, or are they worse now than ever.
I guess another way of putting it is, all things except race being equal, they're probably harder on Obama than they would have been with Edwards. But all things wouldn't have been equal with Edwards. He would have had the love child to deal with. Hillary Clinton would have had to deal with being Hillary Clinton. If it's not this, it would have been another thing. Which is not at all to minimize the original point, that race has very likely been a factor. Or even to equate any of the motivations for bile. It's just to say that, without this, it would very likely be something else.
I take your point on Hillary. I don't on John Edwards. Catching hell because you're black or a woman, is not the same as catching it because you cheated on your cancer-stricken wife.
Absolutely. I was really trying to avoid implying that I thought the 'motivations' were equally unjustified. I've never liked John Edwards. I have to admit to some schadenfreude when the whole thing fell apart for him. It's easy to say now, but he's somebody who I think the Republicans had pegged from the start: a sleazy, vain, unprincipled, empty suit of a personal injury lawyer. Sarah Palin in a sportscoat.
I don't think any motivation for an attack on him is equivalent to being impacted by Obama's race. That being said, prior to the affair being public knowledge, one of the memes about him was that he was effete. In the parallel universe where he became president and never had a baby with another woman while his wife is receiving chemo, I can still see...forget it. That guy sucks. I don't even want to finish my point.
Maureen Dowd made the case that Wilson's outburst was motivated by Obama's race:
"Boy, Oh, Boy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=1
Because Obama is such a cosmopolitan, multicultural figure, I see this as part of the notorious Red State/Blue State/Rural/Metropolitan divide. I loved this passage on what New York (or, in this case, what The New York Times Magazine is all about):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24askthetimes.html?pagewanted=all
That reminds me of Obama. And it's contrasted with what Dowd wrote in her piece on Sunday:
Add that to his race and it drives some people in this country crazy. I just hope he can keep the middle.
Everything in the long Dowd quote EXCEPT the statement about women, immigrants, and gays sounds perfectly ghastly.
This is why liberals can only win if they stick to the real essentials and leave the rest of culture alone. I'm convinced the average American wants equality for people regardless of group membership. I'm also convinced that the average American wants a sense of community and place, of tradition, of morality (which is the source of a lot of arguments in favor or equality, and of valuing people for something other than slick arguments and slicker hair.
Eventually the two sides in the 60s debate are going to merge and produce some kind of synthesis. Let's hope it's the best of both (equality and community), not the worst (bigotry and superficiality).
What's so ghastly about the rest of the quote? I'm a life long New Yorker so this place (and everything Dowd said about it) is just normal to me. It's everyplace else I look at with varying degrees of suspicion (which is a failing I realize).
Forgive me for my imprecision. First I link the Dowd article, then I note a completely different piece from the editor of the New York Times Magazine, then I go back to the Dowd article. Sorry for the confusion.
Sorry if I repeat myself, but my view is that race is one of many ways in which the American populace is being played by private interests who want to keep their stranglehold on the American political scene. It is an important factor because of the way American demographics are shifting, which leads to a deepening fear that began during the sixties when many non white groups were making themselves heard for the first time in a powerful way. There is a wide swath of Americans whose own lives are degrading with everyone else and in a classic bait and switch are conned into believing their problems are about affirmative action and illegal immigration rather than the fleecing that has been going on as a result of conservative regulatory (the lack thereof), tax, wage, and trade policies, not to mention a bankrupting military jones, the likes of which the entire rest of the world has no concept.
I've been mulling over this issue for the past few weeks, from the town hall meetings of the summer through Obama's schoolkids speech to Joe Wilson's outburst.
And the way I've come to describe it, is withdrawal.
It's as though prejudice is a sort of addiction -- racism being the big one, of course, but homophobia and sexism and anti-Semitism are in there, too -- a hit of a drug that we take to make ourselves feel better: the Us/Them dichotomy that says you may be a poor sharecropper, but at least you ain't black; you may have no college degree but at least you ain't gay; you may live in a trailer park but at least you ain't a Jew. Your life may be crap, but you can go to bed at night knowing you are superior to THEM (insert THEM of your choice here).
And it's as though, over the years, we've been trying some sort of gradual detox -- Brown vs. Board of Ed, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, civil rights and civil unions -- to wean ourselves off this drug of prejudice. And what the Obama election is, is a change from our country going to a methadone clinic to "maintain" some sort of semblance of equality to going off the smack of prejudice cold turkey.
When I look at Joe Wilson, or the Tea Parties, or signs that say "God Hates Fags" I think of the horrible, gut-wrenching, vomitous, sweating, shaking holy hell that is opiate withdrawal, and it describes perfectly to me what we, as a country, are going through.
I hope the patient survives.
Interesting way of thinking about it. In terms of the immediate moment, I think a lot of what we're seeing from the Right is withdrawal from being at the apex of power after 2004 elections. They came crashing down pretty hard and fast.
I think your post is very insightful. I'd like to call your attention to a related point.
In an earlier exchange here about TNC's Civil War tourism last month, I noted that in The Mind of the South, author W.J. Cash said that poor whites in the antebellum South based much of their sense of pride and self-worth on the fact that, although they didn't have much, at least they were white and free and therefore weren't on the lowest rung of the social ladder.
When slavery was ended, they were knocked off their next-to-the-lowest rung, and they were furious. That fury was part of the reason for the rise of the KKK during Reconstruction
I think the fury from some that is being directed against President Obama is closely related to this Reconstruction mindset. In the postwar South, that anger coalesced into the Klan. It looks like the boiling anger about Obama is coalescing into something equally as hateful and violent.
But we certainly had wackos from the Right doing crazy, scary stuff in previous years. How many bombed abortion clinics or gay bars = one shot-up Holocaust museum? And using those incidents to measure how scary and crazy a movement is has problems, because terrorism is so rare, and so random in its effects. (Think how much worse the Olympic Park bombing might have been, or how much worse the Holocaust Museum shooting might have been.)
This Pew Center survey report discusses the shift in the parties. One big surprise, to me, is that it doesn't show the Republican party becoming more conservative. They've lost about the same proportion of relatively more conservative and relatively more moderate members. One thing that has changed is that Republicans are deeply unhappy with their party leadership, or at least were when this poll was taken.
Is there some way we could measure the hostility or over-the-top craziness or nastiness? Otherwise, this whole discussion is hard to get a handle on--how do you decide whether the crazies have really gotten louder or not?
How is it that "the Right" is always characterized as being involved with domestic terrorism and political violence, while domestic terrorists with a leftist bent are minimized? The FBI classified the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as the top domestic terrorist threat in the United States in 2001. They have caused millions of dollars in property damage by arson, and other attacks. This is undoubtably a leftist group, yet no one seems to be up in arms about the crazy, scary violence of "the Left" I think this double standard is one of the reasons that many on the right become so frustrated with these sorts of discussions.
It's shorthand, and don't for a second pretend like it doesn't go both ways. But if you want a difference, here it is. The terrorists who are associated with the right--abortion clinic bombers and militia types--often identify as Republicans, and the Republican party often panders to them in order to get votes. The ELF types, who are terrorists, no question--often disavow the Democrats as being bought and sold to corporate interests (and they have a point). But even more importantly, when was the last time you saw a Democratic party politician embrace them? Progressives can't even get love from the party most of the time--extremists get shunned.
You may not like to hear this, but it's accurate all the same--the two major parties in this country are center-to-center-right and far-right. There is no organized left with any political power in this country.
I don't see how the Republicans pander to anti-abortion types any more than democrats pander to ELF.
Republicans don't embrace anti-abortion *terrorists* any more than Dems embrace ELF. Both parties do embrace more moderate versions of the extremists and push policies which would be supported by the extremists.
By the way, I'm curious, which party is the far right one? Is it the party which expanded the federal budget by $700 billion, or the one that plans to expand it by $1 trillion? Is it the party that made an $800 billion dollar expansion of government medicine, or the party which plans a bigger expansion of government control of medicine? Is it the party that shifted the tax burden from the poor to the rich, or the party that plans to do the same thing to an even greater degree?
Incertus: I think labeling the parties as center right and far right assumes some universal left/right scale, but there isn't one. Because of the nature of winner-take-all elections and such, the two parties cluster approximately around the center of opinion among voters. But there's nothing meaningful about that center--it moves all the time. The centrist position w.r.t. civil rights for blacks and gays in 1950 is, today, very far to the right of the Republicans. The centrist position of torture in 1980 is, today, rather left-ish.
(One caveat is that left and right doesn't really capture a lot of politics.)
I agree with Incertus(Brian) but there is also a big difference between doing millions of dollars in property damage and killing people. The terrorists who kill people will always get more attention and cause more fear.
Yes, consider the targets. Persons (particularly women who cross socio-economic lines, minorities, gays, etc.) generalize a bit more easily than developers (and the people who buy from them) and researchers.
Er, I thought most of the pro-life-terrorists'[1] victims were doctors and nurses who performed/assisted with abortions. Those folks are not generally marginal members of society, they're (much like researchers) highly-educated and skilled people who have far more choices in life than most people.
In neither case does that change the fact that it's terrorism, or how we should treat the folks we catch doing it. (Provide them free government healthcare, housing, and food for life.)
[1] I will admit to finding the irony of that phrase really entertaining, in a gallows humor sort of way.
Yes, the GOP leadership went after Clinton in the 90's BUT were they able to drum up parades of people to march on Washington with whacked-out posters and banners? I don't remember that happening.
Well, back in the 1990s there wasn't the internet in the same way there is now, nor was Glenn Beck rallying the troops. Both the internet and Fox News personalities work to bring like-minded crazies together and spread rumors and talking points and innuendo.
If the internet had existed in the mid-90s the way it does now, Bill Clinton rumors would've been running rampant and the conspiracies would've had even more traction.
(Note: I'm not arguing that race isn't a factor. Just saying that the media functions differently than it did even 10 years ago.)
The internet did exist in the 2000's and Bush rumors were running rampant. Anyone who reads reddit will remember the endless headlines, "We will be at war with Iran by (next holiday)!"
The economy was considerably better during the Clinton years. Even the recession he had to deal with early in his first term (and which he inherited from Bush I) pales in comparison with the unemployment of 2009. If nothing else, the loonies have a lot more time on their hands today.
This is a really interesting analysis of the situation. The complexity that you highlight just reminds me how, even if we've come a long way, the rest of the path will still be incredibly difficult to walk.
Over at politco.com, there's a poll asking "Do you think race is a factor in the recent hostility against Barack Obama?" Last I looked, 40% said yes, 59% said no, and 1% said they weren't sure. I was shocked - but I shouldn't have been. The question wasn't, is race THE factor. Obviously there's the demographic of the politico web site to take into account, but that the majority of anybody would deny that race is A factor just blows my mind.
I'm beginning to realize that one of the cultural legacies of the 1960s was to make many white people pretend they're raceless. De jure segregation created a very unhealthy obsession within the white community on whiteness. When de jure segregation died away (for the most part), many whites learned only a partial lesson. Slowly, the obsession with white purity died away, which was good. But the lesson that was forgotten was that being white meant being part of a race, too, that it carried with it certain types of meaning and privileges. The mantra has become "race doesn't matter anymore." But what's really meant is that racial segregation is in the past (though not really), and therefore we shouldn't talk about race anymore.
It's as if the word race automatically connotes fire hoses in Birmingham or the lynch mob, and no one wants to associate themselves with that. Or race means black or Asian or Latino or Native American, and whites consider themselves outside of racial groupings. Until whites (including me, for as much as I like to talk, I forget, too) remember that they are white, which is very different from "not black" or "not of a race," then they'll never come close to understanding how much race still is a factor in how we interact with each other. There's a very dangerous amnesia that happens when it's assumed that only black Americans have to confront their racial heritage.
There is much truth in what you are saying. The racism that I grew up with in the south was against blacks and it raw, brutal, and very exposed. I didn't understand racism outside of that very limited context until I moved to California. I can certainly understand how people can get stuck there, where I was, if they lack curiousity about what is happening outside of their own small world.
Racism is certainly part of the problem, but it's larger than that of course. We basically have a group of people in this country who choose to act like crying children any time something doesn't go there way. The country's basically made the choice that these people will be placated in some way at any time in the interest of balance. So we're never really going to see this pushed on television; while I've seen a ton of stuff about Wilson, I haven't seen anything on tv bringing up the Strom Thurmond connections. Hell, everyone even said with a straight face, "now, from the Strom Thurmond room..."
And so look. At the end of the day, the outburst probably wasn't mostly motivated by race. But I feel that the problem is, for the most part, you can't even ask the question to a large portion of America. And when we're so disconnected from reality, it doesn't bode well.
As Mark Twain said: History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Even as I am in my early 30's, I keep going back the fact that in the 50's and 60's, there were significant numbers of people in this country who really believed Dr. King and Malcolm X were Communist agents from the Soviet Union. Now, what makes you think that the descendants of the Dixiecrats/modern GOP would not view Obama with suspicion?
Remember: The Tea-Baggers cri de coeur is "We want our country back!"
Only this time, they want their country back from the Kenyan Communist agent whom G. Gordon Liddy referred to as "an interloper."
As mentioned previously on this blog and elsewhere, this rage against Obama goes back to the sneaking suspicion that "once again" a black man is stealing something from those non-minority Real Americans who "built this country." And by the way, let us also not overlook the fact that, historically, the majority of Cuban-American voters would run for the hills to not be associated with the Democratic Party.
I will give you three guesses for the phenomenon.
To be sure, race is but one factor in the seething rage at Obama, as one of Sullivan's readers points out here:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/not-racism-projection.html
I grew up in rural North Carolina smack dab in the middle of these people. In fifth grade, I was the only white boy in my class to vote for Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms in the school election. I'm not patting myself on the back, just saying how it is. What these people hate is liberalism, pure and simple. Race is part of it, but only a part. These people hate the idea that America is anything less than pure and great. They do not want to admit the full evil of slavery and Jim Crow, and thus they believe that affirmative action is grossly unfair. They believe that America should be the undisputed superpower in the world, and that we should fuck up any other country that dares challenge our greatness. Social programs that uplift the disenfranchised are an unfair tax because America's market provides a level playing field and everyone who works hard enough should succeed. They forget how their own white Southern grandparents and great grandparents were pulled out of the depths of poverty and depravity by FDR's big government New Deal. They love Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, and thus they hate anything in American culture that smells of artsiness or intellectualism. Thus anyone who listens to Radiohead or watches the Wire is part of that "snobby Eastern elite" who looks down on rural culture and the Southern way of life.
It is true that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were from the rural South, and hardly all of rural Southerners fit into the Sarah Palin base. But certainly the majority do, and when they can't get their guy into the White House they go ape shit.
I'd argue that the hatred is unprecedented if you don't consider the last president. At how many protests was Bush hung in effigy? How many democrats have ranted for the last several years that both the '00 and '04 elections were stolen. I have not been attached to either party through my adult life until I registered as a democrat to caucas for Obama, and to me it seems like just more of the spiraling upward hatred that has infected all of our discourse going back to the Reagan years( and maybe beyond, thats just when my civic memory gets good enough to have a feel for it.)
Is the difference just the media presence that the Right has, in Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, etc.? It seems that hatred of Clinton and Obama are more mainstream, especially in the media, than hatred of Bush. I wouldn't compare protesters with major media figures or elected officials yelling "You lie" at a nationally televised speech.
Also, the elections of '00 and '04 were very close. There is ample evidence of irregularities. If Obama had not won so convincingly, you can be certain there would have been total madness over whether the election was stolen. I think a lot of anger at Bush has its origin in people's sense that the election of '00 was stolen.
The left has Paul Krugman, Michael Moore, Al Franken and Dan Rather (until he took his Bush hatred a little too far).
I don't see much difference.
I don't think Olberman and Maher were any less visible or virulent than Beck or Limbaugh. (though I'm a very infrequent television watcher outside of football)
Wilson was wrong (and possibly racially motivated) to yell "you lie", but I don't recall Bush ever saying in a speech that his opponents were flat out lying the way the President did earlier in his speech the other night, which seemed to me over a previously established line in our national discourse.
I agree that was part of the genesis of the anti-Bush anger. Close elections are currently a flaw in our system, because we haven't been willing to admit that at some point in closeness we get beyond the margin of error in our accounting (Florida in'00, Washington State gubernatorial election a couple of years ago, Franken/Coleman last year). i think at some point of closeness you need a new election, because the personal choice of state election officials is not the way to settle a close election.
Mr Shrimp:
I think that was true at first--people were mad at Bush for the contested 2000 election, which was basically a tie resolved 5-4 in the Supreme Court. (At least one critical part of the decision was, I think, a party-line vote.)
But the Republicans exploited the post-9/11 fear and rallying around the president with some really nasty political campaigns to get the majority, and absolutely played hardball once they got it. I think that got a lot of Democrats mad, and left them looking forward to payback.
Re: . If Obama had not won so convincingly, you can be certain there would have been total madness over whether the election was stolen.
Which explains the Birther nonsense. There's no way to doubt that Obama won the election fairly, so they have to doubt that he's qualified to be president instead.
The big question, to me, is what now? Lets stipulate that some of the negative energy being generated is coded racism. Certainly when it becomes explicit, the Republican party will disavow it and the dems can do their touchdown dance at the discrimination goalpost. But the rest of the time, how do you tease out the racist ignoramuses who don't trust Obama because he's black from the religious ignoramuses and the gun nut ignoramuses who don't trust him because he's, well, a Democrat.
At the end of the day, whether there are crypto-racists or not, Obama wins by convincing people of his policies. Will having the Democratic shield-bearers cry 'racism' negate the right more than, say, deconstructing their mostly laughable attacks that are somehow getting traction?
--"Certainly when it becomes explicit, the Republican party will disavow it and the dems can do their touchdown dance at the discrimination goalpost."---
Re, the Democrats "touchdown dance." LOL! hehe. Thanks for this funny visual.
Signs from Tea Bagger rally that just might indicate racial undertones:
1. "What's the difference between the Cleveland Zoo and the White House? The zoo has an African and the White House has a Lyin' African."
2. "You can run Obama, but you cannot hide from the people's majority will."
3. "AP 'Associated Puppetmasters'" (with pictures of Oprah and Obama)
4. "James Clyburn: racist"
5. "We came unarmed ... this time."
I think these are the same people Wilson is trying to fundraise from now, which is why he refuses to apologize again and now in fact seems unrepentant.
Why do I care that we identify the racism, even though I agree with TNC that it might not serve a purpose every time? I think it infuriates me because each and every one of the people who made those homemade signs would deny that they are racist, but say Obama and Sotomayor are. The reality refusal is what gets to me.
Well articulated post, TNC.
I've been around for awhile and have been paying attention to politics (to varying degrees) since LBJ was president, and I know what is happening to President Obama right now is unprecedented.
Part of it is being a Democrat, unquestionably. This is how the conservative Republicans treat Democratic presidents. They use whatever they can to rile up their base to repeat and disseminate a negative message. Everyone who was tuned in for the "weekend of Reverand Wright" back in March of 2008 knew unequivocally that race would be used against Obama from that day forward, throughout the campaign, and throughout his presidency if he were to win.
I can't even think clearly about this anymore, I really can't. I take this so personally. I am not black, but I have been a Democrat or Democratic supporter all of my life, and I grew up in the south witnessing the civil rights movement.
Obama's presidency means so much more to me than the fact that we elected a Democrat who, in my opinion, was the most qualified candidate.
I'm trying to figure out why this disrespect hurts so badly. One of my major issues is that Obama is identified with the first generation of beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, and he is without question one of the very best of that generation, by any measure you can apply.
So, this is how the GOP treats the very best from that generation, proving beyond all doubt that they really do not understand or respect what the civil rights movement was about. Nor do they respect the sacrifice that one generation made for the next, or what this man, this first black president means to literally tens of millions of people (both black and white) beyond just the normal victory of the Democrats winning the presidency.
I do not feel any better knowing that this is just the Republican way of trying to get rid of a Democratic president. We know their tactics, to be sure. But using race against Obama, and using it in such a vitriolic, ugly, hate-filled, and dishonest way just takes me back to where I came from. The same hatred, the same ugly white faces, the same ignorance, the same fear.
Of course race is a factor (the predominent factor), in the energy of the Obama haters. The republican party has made race and race coded messages, the central tenet of what they cobbled together as a party philosophy. "Crime" and "welfare" were never really "national issues", but only trotted out as such, because of their associations with black people, in the minds of the targets of the original "Southern Strategy". When the entirely cynical decision was made to exploit the long standing white supremacist sentiment and racial animosity of Democratic voting whites, for political advantage, it was done specifically because it was understood that such an identification would provide an electoral base for the party that would not and COULD not, be eroded for generations. The virulence of the non rational opposition to Obama is the undiluted descendant of the virulent racism of years past, with the same propensity for the violent act.
Obama is nine months into his first term, and (apparently) skillfully responding to a host of astoundingly complex interlocking issues. It is hard to imagine the responses to these issues that any of the other candidates who entered the primaries, would have put forth, that would have been "better". Yet the right seeks to associate his brief time as President with Hitler. Why should that be? What is their fear? That Obama plans some mass extemination of some subset of the American population? Euthansia for the retired or jobless? He clearly has not championed "socialism" in any sense of what that actually means (unless you count the finacial system bailout and that is certainly NOT what they mean). What catastrophic policy are we on the verge of implementing that needs the mobilization of an armed citizenry to attend discussions of healthcare financing?
So WHAT fuels the crazy? What drives them to convulsive, inchoate rage? I know what I think, I am willing to entertain alternative explanations for it. None come to mind....
Oh TNC. I hesitate to do this, because it's so not done, but I know that you know, and the commenters know, that I generally never do things that are not done, so I'm going to allow myself some lee-way this one time. Ahem:
THIS.
Thank you.
What was that chinese curse?
"May you live in interesting times"
Mr. C,
I don't know how far to take the racism as a motivating factor. certainly it plays a part. It certainly is as you say an intensifying factor. However, I really don't know what to make of it all. It may be that the level of crazy we are seeing is a concerted ploy by the republican party to energize the "base" and make them automatically distrust any democrat. I'm extremely wary looking for a reason in all of this because I think sometimes when people look for causes they see what they want to see.
It may be that what we are seeing in terms of crazy is merely a manifestation of a closed system of information that doesn't allow other points of view any credence. As an example a person who follows a certain mindset can read books, listen to radio, watch t.v. and never encounter a point of view with which they disagree. That has to have a detrimental effect upon a person's ability to reason. Personally it feels more like a cult to me than anything else, and it's really hard to know why cults form unless you were there to begin with.
As always thanks a bunch.
Under Clinton, the nutcases blew up a federal office building, including a day care center.
I'd say the frenzy isn't new, and I'd also say race adds at least 20 percent to the scale of the frenzy.
I'm counting on state and federal law enforcement having upped their efforts at least 40 percent to compensate.
Even so, I'm assuming that as a country, we're going to lose some lives to this garbage.
To which, I think the right response isn't fear or anger, but very calmly repeating:
Freedom isn't free.
These colors don't run.
I pledge allegiance to....the republic for which it stands.
We can take these fools down. I suspect we'll have to prove it. Calmly, firmly, with the minimum force needed to do what must be done.
The modern Republican party was constructed as a protest against the civil rights movement, in order to take advantage of the schism between Southern Democrats and the New Democratic coalition of northern liberal, labor union, and African-American voters. That was the "Southern Strategy." Right-wing craziness has ALWAYS played on racist fears--it is the ideological structure upon which the party was built. So whether individual right-wing loonies are racists misses the point. Even if they are not individually racist (Best friends are black, etc.) their ideology is built upon racist logic. This is why history matters. Our ideologies can only exist within existing structures, and the existing structure for Republican governance flows from the central belief that the civil rights movement, and the laws which resulted from it, was a communist, unconstitutional power grab.
Your co-blogger on the left of the masthead coined the phrase "devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant, devotees of the party out of power are insane". Sometimes it is just that simple.
But that idea is itself quite smug, not to mention reductionist and cynical. So there's no good time to support the party that best represents your interests or ideological point of view, then? Come on, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Being a "devotee" is not the same thing as being a rabid fanatic. Enthusiasm in politics is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, because we need a lot more of it right now, particularly from liberals and progressives. And more to the point: Most of us don't have the luxury of standing atop an elite perch, staring down on the process of democracy chortling about how silly it all is.
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Since Joe Wilson is a white male southerner, his outburst must be driven by racism.
Gee, nothing like a little racial stereotyping.
.
Vietnam.
It's worth remembering that the Democrats also got themselves into a losing war during the 1960s. I tend to think this issue trumped race as the source of the '60s kulturkampf.
Johnson never had the chance or the money to buy the silence of the white working class. Nixon made hay of that omission.
Southern conservatives have evolved but not by much. They have moved away from the ugliness of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace but not far enough to stop telling watermelon jokes. But does that mean they have evolved their thinking or just their presentation? Maybe 40 years ago, Joe Wilson would have added a third word at the end of his outburst like "boy" or something much worse.
The culture of racism and segregation is still with the southern conservatives. Maybe Joe Wilson doesn't consider himself a racist. Maybe he would never actively discriminate himself. We really don't know. But he lives in a state and belongs to a party that is dominated by conservative white males and that has to shape his perceptions.
Mike Burns
http://www.disorderlyreport.com/
not the factor but a factor
While there may be other factors at play, it is the defining factor.