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.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited (Part 2, 1968)

Despite Johnson's landslide victory, all was not well for the Democrats in 1964. The Convention had been marred by an embarrassing situation with the delegates from Mississippi. There was the official delegation, all white and elected under Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised blacks, and then there was the MFDP (photo, left), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was demanding representation.

Eventually a compromise was worked out but not before a number of delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out.

The core problem was this: Lyndon Johnson was bucking one hundred of years of southern history wherein the Democratic Party was the official party of racism and Jim Crow and Republicans were the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. Although the Republicans had effectively ended Reconstruction and black suffrage in 1877, when they negotiated a deal with Southern Democrats to fix the presidential election of that year, most blacks still voted Republican and virtually all Southern racists voted Democratic. That was all about to change.

By signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by sending the FBI to Neshoba County, Mississippi later that year to investigate the murder of three Civil Rights workers, Johnson was running the risk of permanently losing the Democratic Party base in the South and reshaping American politics.  To his credit, he did it anyway.

The events in Neshoba were fairly accurately dramatized in the movie Mississippi Burning.  Three civil rights workers - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney -were arrested by the Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a member of the KKK, as was his boss, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. They were "released" and then captured and summarily executed late in the evening of June 21, 1964.

FBI agents were on the scene the morning after the disappearance and by the end of the next day, there were at least 10 other agents in town working the case.  The military arrived on June 25 and the following week, J. Edgar Hoover himself came to town to announce the opening of the first F.B.I. office in Mississippi.

The investigation went nowhere until the FBI offered a large cash reward.  Informants soon came forward.

When their bodies were found on August 4,  the situation got even uglier. Indictments were handed down on December 4, 1964 and 17 men were arrested, including Sherrif Rainey and Deputy Price.

On February 24, 1965, Federal Judge William Harold Cox, a Kennedy appointee, threw out all of the indictments except those against Rainey and Price.  The photo below was printed in newspapers all over America and millions of people were confronted with and appalled by, what was going on in Mississippi.

 

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, who overturned it and returned it back to Judge Cox and the indictments were reinstated. There is a lot more to the story and it's quite interesting to read. You can find a much more full account here. Suffice it to say, it was a travesty of justice and I've gone through all of the facts, not to dwell on the horrors of Mississippi in the 60's, but because Neshoba will be critically important to the future of the Republican Party 16 years later.

This would all come to a head in 1968, an extremely traumatic year in American history. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April, Bobby Kennedy had been shot in June and the country had been beset by race riots for half the year in cities across America. The Vietnam War was going full-force and the counter-culture's anti-war riots were splitting the country in two. Or as it turns out, three.


Johnson declined to run for reelection and, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee chosen to run against the Republican contender, Richard Nixon. But there was an unexpected spoiler in the race - the Democratic governor of Alabama George Wallace, who was running as an independent.

So who was George Wallace and who voted for him? George Wallace had started out as a relative liberal, running for the governorship of Alabama in 1958 on an anti-Klan platform with the endorsement of the NAACP. He lost the Democratic primary to the Klan candidate, John Patterson and afterward, he vowed, "I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again." 

Wallace promptly switched sides, became the voice of white racism and segregation and won the 1962 governor's race easily. "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," Wallace said at his inauguration speech.

Wallace made the cover of Time in 1963 when he personally stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama and blocked the admission of a black student.

Wallace ran in 1968 under the American Independent Party banner, with retired General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. General LeMay, famous for being the creator of the phrase "bomb them back to the stone age," was interested in running to help dispel America's "phobia" about using nuclear weapons. Wallace's camp attempted to get LeMay to keep quiet about this with mixed results. (Below, Wallace supporters in Ohio.)

Nonetheless, Wallace polled just under 10 million votes. Moreover, George Wallace carried five states - Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. Wallace got 13.5% of the total popular vote. Besides segregation, Wallace was very much channeling white working-class anger and his platform called for increases in social security and medicaid spending as well. Most significantly, Wallace touched a raw nerve in both of the mainstream parties when he told his working class voters "there's not a dime's worth of difference between them."


The Southern Strategy
This phrase was popularized by Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book "The Emerging Republican Majority." The crux of Phillips prediction was this: Republicans didn't need and were not going to get a significant number of black votes ever again. But by encouraging the end of Jim Crow and the enfranchisement of black voters, they would be pushing previously Democratic racist voters in the South over to the Republican Party.

And that's exactly what happened.  Wallace ran again in 1972, but in May of that year, an attempted assassination took him out of the race.  Nixon ran against George McGovern and won every state except Massachusetts.

But the Southern Strategy wouldn't really reach its zenith until the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited (Part 1 - 1964)

Reading an editorial the other day in the Wall Street Journal that suggested that the man the Republicans need in 2012 is - and I'm not making this up - Dick Cheney - I got to thinking about how the Republicans managed to get to this particular place at this exact moment in history. 

In a party whose rhetoric is currently dominated by the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, the candidacy of Dick Cheney makes perfect sense. Never mind the fact that he’ll be 71 years old then, or that the “health problems” section in his Wikipedia entry takes up 9 paragraphs, or that his disapproval rating from Gallup sticks right at around 60%. The fact that Cheney is perhaps the least electable candidate in America doesn't seem to matter the WSJ brain trust. Cheney is a true believer and if the WSJ loves anybody, it’s true believers.

In November 1964, just before the election that pitted LBJ against Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, Harper's Magazine published a brilliant essay by Richard Hofstadter entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

No one better epitomized that anger than Barry Goldwater. With former Vice-President and 1960 presidential candidate Dick Nixon off pouting in California, the Republican Party of 1964 was divided into several angry feuding factions, with no clear leader. Goldwater was the darling of the conservative wing of the party which despised the east-coast moderates, represented by Nelson Rockefeller, whom they perceived as elitists and compromisers. Goldwater had famously said “"sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea", exactly capturing the anti-intellectualism and ideological extremism of this particular branch of the Republican Party.

Hofstadter’s essay is 45 years old yet just as relevant today. Hofstadter again:

"As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention."

Rockefeller was well ahead in the polls and the primaries until three days before the Republican Convention when, his new wife, Happy, gave birth to a baby. Goldwater launched a vitriolic television campaign portraying Rockefeller as a homewrecker (Happy had divorced her husband to marry him) and portraying Rockefeller as morally unfit to be president. Goldwater carried the state, narrowly.

So what had caused this intra-party hatred and feuding? What was behind all the crazy talk? That question is very easy to answer - The Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation.

The Civil Rights Bill had been introduced by JFK in June of 1963, following the Birmingham riots, which were widely seen on national television and the brutality of which had shocked the nation. A few weeks later Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. Later that summer, 200,000 people marched to Washington with Martin Luther King where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A few weeks after that, a bomb exploded in a Birmingham Church, killing four young black girls, again shocking the nation. These events spurred both President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, to take Civil Rights more seriously and to use federal authority to protect the rights of black citizens in the South.

Two months after the Birmingham church bombing, JFK would be dead. LBJ would take his place with a vehement determination to push through the Civil Rights legislation, no matter what the costs. LBJ did manage to get the legislation passed, despite desperate filibustering by racist Southern senators. When he signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, he allegedly said “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

Of course, the problem wasn't confined only to the South, as the above photo from a CORE protest in Seattle in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 shows.

It was in this atmosphere that the Republican National Convention took place six weeks later in July 1964. Goldwater was the champion of what came to be known as “States Rights,” which became the code for being against racial integration.

The ensuing Republican national convention in San Francisco was arguably the ugliest and most divisive in the history of the Republican party.

Goldwater won the nomination and when Nelson Rockefeller took the podium, here is what he said, as he was booed and hooted at by the crowd:

"During this year I have crisscrossed this nation, fighting … to keep the Republican party the party of all the people ... and warning of the extremist threat, its danger to the party, and danger to the nation. These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror, they have no program for America and the Republican Party... they operate from dark shadows of secrecy. It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire, militant minority whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers."

It was all for naught. The extremists had taken over the party and Goldwater was the man in 1964. His acceptance speech contained the following passage, quoted in almost every article written about him since then: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Less often quoted is this passage from Goldwater’s speech:

“Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the rest: of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.”

Richard Hofstadter again:

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to posess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press, he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic Confessional).”

The election of 1964 was one of the most lopsided in history, with Goldwater carrying only five southern states plus Arizona, his home state. Yet conservatives look back on it fondly as the beginnings of the modern conservative movement and in many respects it was, but not for the reasons that they publicly ascribe.

Above, counties carried by Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election:

It would take Dick Nixon to turn it around in 1968. He was the only one who could unite the east and west coast factions of the Republican Party with his “Southern Strategy,” which I’ll cover tomorrow.