The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited - 2009

Above, a not-at-all-racist example of Republican humor, circa 2009, circulated by a Republican activist and AMA House of Delegates member.

So here we are in 2009 and we have an African-American president.   Actually, a bi-racial president but in the bizarre context of American race relations, where 144 years after the Civil War, the "one-drop" rule, although no longer the actual law, apparently still applies. If you have a white parent and a black parent, you are apparently considered "black." I could write a few thousand words on this topic alone, but let's move on.

Meanwhile, we also have - and I will argue that it is not a coincidence - the most virulently hateful political rhetoric that we've seen in 50 years, since the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950's.

The Rhetoric

An index of various fringe memes about President Obama, with a translation on the right:

• He is not one of us.  (the "one-drop" rule, again)
  
• He hates white people (uhm, but his mother is white, oh yeah, the one-drop rule again)
  
• He is not really an American. (Foreigners are weird, dangerous, bad!)
• He's a "puppet" and is being controlled by someone else. (Because, he's, you know, stupid.)
  
• He is a Muslim. (Muslims are bad!)
  
• He is a communist. (Communists are bad!)
  
• He is a fascist.  (Because he's forcing us to... well, he just is!)
  
• He is Hitler. (When all else fails, compare them to Hitler)
• He is the Anti-Christ! (Apparently, even the Anti-Christ can't get universal healthcare passed)
  

These are the common memes and they are omnipresent.  They are also all demonstrably false.  Hardly a day goes by that I don't get some nutty e-mail from someone I am vaguely acquainted with containing a variation on one of the above.  We've all seen them.

Before going on, let's stop for just a minute and actually look at Obama's background and what he's done as president.  Reading the list of right-wing claims above, you'd think Louis Farrakhan was President.  But that's not the case.

Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School.  He was president of the Law Review at Harvard.  He was a college professor and then a state senator from Illinois and then a U.S. Senator from Illinois.  He was elected president by a decisive majority.  He has continued the foreign policy of George Bush almost verbatim, including the retention of Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.  At the Treasury Department, he's replaced Bush's Goldman Sachs guys with his own Goldman Sachs guys. He is a centrist, arguably to a fault. Personally, he vacations in Martha's Vinyard, not exactly a hotbed of working-class revolutionaries or the Nation of Islam.  He's extremely intelligent, articulate and likable. 

So what's up with the crazed hostility from the Republicans and the right-wing?


Selected Quotations

"Obama is at war with the American people." Sean Hannity

"This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep seated hatred for white people, or white culture, I don't know what it is." Glenn Beck on "Fox and Friends"

"So I find it interesting that among those who oppose Obama a lot of people think he couldn’t be doing this on his own. There’s gotta be somebody behind him, somebody writing the speeches. We know that’s Axelrod. Somebody putting words in the teleprompter. We know that that’s Axelrod. Somebody who may have chosen him, prepped him, groomed him, what have you, some man behind the curtain." Rush Limbaugh

"I want my country back!"
a middle-aged white woman "birther" at a townhall meeting

As CNN pointed out that last comment -  which is the most on the nose - translates to "How is this black guy all of the sudden running the country?"

This bumper sticker articulates that last thought a little more clearly:

Congressman Paul Broun (R., Georgia) comparing Obama to Hitler:

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Back to our guide through this bizarre landscape, Richard Hofstadter, from 1964's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics:"

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse."

Last month, Broun - a physician - suggested at a rally at the North Georgia Technical College that Obama might "use a pandemic" to take over America.

He also spoke of a "socialistic elite" - Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law. "They're trying to develop an environment where then can take over," he said.  "We've seen that historically."

Richard Hofstadter:

"The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way."

Just in case this type of rhetoric is too theoretical we have images like this, that make the point in a more down to earth fashion:

You see, he's just not "one of us."


Remember what Lee Atwater said:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff."

And in 2009, you talk about "birth certificates" and "death panels" and the like.

Why Is This Happening?
What has caused this crazy and hateful rhetoric?  How have we arrived at a situation in America where a "black" man can get elected president but where images like the ones above are still considered acceptable?, at least to a certain segment of the population.

Take a look at the following chart from The Washington Monthly.

There is clearly a strong geographical bias to this.  Only 47% of the people in the South believe Obama was born in America.  Tomorrow I'll examine that geographical bias in more detail.