A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
Paul Krugman’s column on The Dog Whistle deserves to be read by anyone and everyone who professes bafflement over today’s incoherent politics.
The only thing he omits is a discussion of the degree to which anti-Obama fervor is motivated by the color of this President’s skin. But then, that phenomenon is hard to miss for anyone who isn’t willfully ignoring it.
I can’t add anything to Krugman’s dead-on analysis. Go read it.
CommentsThe Right Wing has its panties in a bunch again. According to the usual suspects, President Obama issued a National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order that gives him “unprecedented new powers to appropriate national resources.”
And what does Snopes have to say about this latest evidence of Obama’s usurpation of power and disregard of the law of the land?
The Executive Order itself is nothing more than a restatement of policy that has been in place for decades and grants no authority to the President or the Cabinet that they don’t already have under existing law.
It has become fashionable to attribute the constant hysteria over anything and everything that Obama does to the same hyper-partisanship that prompted “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” And certainly, partisanship bears some blame.
But let’s get real.
I detested George W. Bush. I disagreed with his naive “faith based initiative.” I was appalled when he took the U.S. into the Iraq War. A list of Bush policies that pushed me out of the Republican party would fill pages of text.
But here’s the thing: these were actual policies. When the man was first elected, I found him likable enough–I certainly didn’t detest him before he even took office. And most of the people I knew who came to dislike him intensely (and were probably unfairly critical from time to time) were also reacting to things the man actually did.
Obama hadn’t even taken office when the ugly emails and the out-and-out lies began. The racism that fuels talk radio and “birthers” and insane accusations is too thick and too widespread and too obvious to ignore. The absolute unwillingness of the Republicans in Congress to work with this President–even to implement programs that they originally proposed–has brought this country to a virtual standstill.
One result of this behavior is ironic: those of us who are repelled by what we see as unhinged, vicous and consistently unfair attacks from people who simply cannot come to terms with the fact that we have a black President find ourselves defending Obama even when he is implementing or continuing policies we would otherwise criticize. As I wrote to a good friend, there’s plenty to legitimately criticize. I’m no fan of the NSA, drone strikes and several other policies this administration has pursued. But calling Obama lawless and a communist, making hysterical accusations about things that previous presidents–including the sainted Reagan– did routinely with absolutely no pushback is so manifestly unjust, people who are fair-minded get protective.
A Facebook post from a (very Republican) friend of mine is a good example of what I’m talking about:
Ok, let me get this straight: Ted Nugent–who during the 2012 campaign declared that if Obama was reelected he (Nugent) would either be dead or in jail within a year (a not-so-veiled threat against the President of the United States)–last month called President Obama a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.” And now, the GOP front runner for the Texas governorship not only welcomes Nugent on his campaign but calls this unhinged racist hater “a fighter for freedom.” What’s wrong with this picture? The Lone Star GOP needs to find a candidate with the basic decency of Gov. George W. Bush. (I didn’t like him as a president but he was no racist hater. I wonder if the same could be said about Greg Abbott. A man is judged by the company he keeps.)
Allowing buffoons and bigots to become the face of the GOP just pushes moderate folks who might otherwise be inclined to vote Republican into the D column.
Defending racist rants as if they were legitimate criticisms, vowing to block this President at every turn (and damn the common good), repels people of good will who would consider — and perhaps be persuaded by–valid and thoughtful critiques.
I see where some of our none-too-subtle citizens have created a “Lynch Obama” website. Remind me again how criticism of this President is all about public policy…
As appalling as this most recent evidence of racial animus is, we would do well to consider an important point made by Martin Longmont at Political Animal last week– a reminder that sometimes escapes those of us disheartened by the outsize role overt racism plays in criticism of this President.
After reminding readers of the more outrageous accusations thrown at Bill Clinton, he writes
First, the country could elect Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia president and the Republicans would treat the Democrats’ most conservative senator as though he were advocating a communist revolution. This seems to be an essential tool in the GOP’s political tool-kit and it will be used completely irrespectively of how the Democrat actually behaves.
Second, that people blame the president when there is gridlock much more than they blame the people who won’t compromise. This is because most people do not properly understand the limitations on the office of the president’s power. And, so, you will get even somewhat savvy political commentators saying stupid things like the president could get more cooperation if he just invited more of his opponents over for dinner.
Truer words were never written.
As he acknowledges, the election of Obama unleashed a disheartening amount of racism. But the precise amount has to be calculated by subtracting out the usual lunacy and seeing how much unhinged animus remains.
CommentsI recently read an article that traced the roots of Tea Party zealotry all the way back to 1938 and the first signs of the eventual split between Northern and Southern Democrats. The trajectory of intensely racialized politics continued through Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the Reagan realignment, giving us today’s “rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican Party.”
That’s a nice way of saying that today’s GOP is a party of Southern white guys, and a lot of them really resent the fact that we have a black President.
My husband and I have friends from the South who still refer to the Civil War as “the war between the States.” I used to think that phrase–and the hostility it conveyed–were remnants of a time past.
Granted, when I went to school in Chapel Hill, NC, in the sixties, there were still separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Just a couple of years ago, a docent at the Rice Museum in Georgetown, SC, told us how unfair it was that slaveowners weren’t compensated for the loss of their “property” via the Emancipation Proclamation. (And before you hit that comment button, anyone who has listened to lame “jokes” at Northern cocktail parties knows racism isn’t limited to the South.) But America was making progress! These retrograde attitudes were on the wane. Or so I (naively) thought.
And then Barack Obama was elected, and–rather than confirming progress– the boil was lanced, the rocks lifted…pick your metaphor.
Now let me say up front that it is perfectly possible to disagree with this–or any–President about policies and priorities. It is perfectly acceptable to criticize a chief executive, and to do so loudly and vehemently. And there are plenty of Republicans whose disagreements with this President are simply that: disagreements.
But only the willfully blind can deny that there are also frightening numbers of people who are clearly and obviously motivated by racial animus.
These are the people whose “policy disagreements” with Obama emerged before he had policies, and whose “principled” disputes included birther conspiracy theories, allegations that he was/is a Muslim, a Kenyan, a socialist, a Nazi–“policy disputes” that took the form of cartoons portraying him as a monkey, pictures of the White House with watermelons on the lawn, vile comments posted to news stories, and the behavior of Tea Party crowds like the recent rally at the White House featuring Sarah Palin, a confederate flag, and demands that the President “put down the Q’uaran.”
Joe the Plumber (remember him?), never the brightest bulb in the room, wasn’t exactly subtle last weekend when he posted an article on his blog titled: “America Needs a White Republican President.”
These aren’t policy disputes.
The vitriol has been hard to miss–unless, of course, you prefer not to see it. And there are a lot of otherwise nice people–people who would never burn a cross on someone’s lawn, or make overtly racist remarks–who clearly prefer not to see what is glaringly obvious. (A lawyer of my acquaintance recently professed surprise when someone commented on the outpouring of racism in the wake of Obama’s election, saying he hadn’t noticed anything of the sort. Evidently he doesn’t get the offensive forwarded emails, or read the comments sections of the daily paper, or listen to Rush Limbaugh or his clones.)
I don’t know what we can do about the seething hatred triggered, ironically, by the election of a black President. Historians confirm that racism, Anti-Semitism, homophobia and the like tend to spike during periods of economic uncertainty, and we can hope that as the economy improves, it will subside.
I do know one thing: Edmund Burke was right when he said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
At the very least, the good people need to speak up. Pretending not to see the ugliness and vitriol just feeds the hatred.
Who’d have thought the Civil War would last so long…..
CommentsWith the exception of gay rights, America doesn’t seem to be moving in an inclusive direction.
Quite the contrary.
As I write this, I’ve just looked at a lengthy strand of twitter comments about the new Miss America. She’s of Indian ancestry, and that fact unleashed some truly despicable comments about what it means to be both beautiful and a “real” American.
In the wake of President Obama’s election, overt racism has mushroomed; the sort of sentiments that simply weren’t made in polite company have become commonplace. Blatantly racist emails circulate among the like-minded and (occasionally) other appalled recipients , and racist blogs and Facebook posts are daily occurrences.
It’s not just race. The past few years have seen us take giant steps backward with respect to women’s rights. Bigotry against people who appear to be from the Middle East has hardened, and “Muslim” has become an insult, rather than a description of someone’s religious identity. Immigration reform? Forget it. Anti-immigrant sentiment has stalled even modest Congressional action.
And of course, legal and social progress notwithstanding, gay slurs continue to be thrown around with abandon.
So what are we to make of this ugly time we are going through? Are we just going through a particularly pissy phase, made worse by economic insecurity and rapid social change? Or is the nastiness a permanent part of the American landscape—one that has always been here, but (thanks to the Internet) is suddenly “in our face” in a way it never was before?
Over fifty years ago, a social scientist named Gordon Allport wrote a seminal book, The Nature of Prejudice. The book was written right after President Truman integrated the Armed Forces, while Americans were coming to terms with the presence of “colored” soldiers bunking down with the white ones. Then as now, other social shifts were intruding on “the way things have always been.”
Allport’s great contribution was to distinguish between prejudices that were simply an outgrowth of widely held social attitudes and those that were central to an individual’s identity. He found that most people who expressed bigotry against blacks or Jews (then the most frequent targets) were not invested in their negative opinions –they had simply accepted common stereotypes about “others,” and they could be educated to change what were essentially casual beliefs they had never really examined.
The other category was much smaller, but also much more troubling. These were the individuals that Allport—who founded the discipline of social psychology—described as invested in their bigotries. For whatever reason—bad toilet training, lack of parental affection, abuse—their belief in the inferiority of designated “others” had become absolutely central to their personalities. Education would have no effect at all on their attitudes.
The question we face today, of course, is: into which group do today’s haters fall? And which category will define America going forward?
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