by the name “Barack” rather than “Barry” as a way to thumb his nose at America, because he “hates this country” and is trying to dismantle it “brick by brick.”
It is one thing to suggest the president is wrong about energy policy, or the economy. It is quite another to claim—as again, Limbaugh has—that his “political model” is Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and that soon Obama, like Mugabe, will be confiscating white people’s farms. Or, as Beck opines, that he is “just like Hitler” and that his calls for national service and volunteerism are equivalent to the creation of a new Gestapo. Or that his health care reform bill is just about getting “reparations for slavery.”
It is one thing to believe President Obama naïve about the importance of a strong national defense. It is something altogether different to believe—as a sign held by a protester at a recent Tea Party rally exclaimed—that his real plan is “white slavery.”
Or to claim that his proposal to impose a small tax on visits to tanning salons is a racist imposition on whites who comprise the bulk of such customers, as was said recently by several right-wing radio show hosts.
Or to say that he looks like a “skinny ghetto crackhead,” as activist Brent Bozell has called him.
Or to choose to portray him, as a viral e-mail did recently, as a pair of white eyes against a black background in a picture of the nation’s presidents. Or to portray him as a pimp, as was done in a recent e-mail blast from a Tea Party candidate for governor of New York.
Or to joke that he might be planning to replace the annual White House Easter egg hunt with a watermelon hunt, as the Mayor of Los Alamitos, California, suggested before resigning.
Or to insist that Obama needs to “learn how to be an American,” as Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu recently suggested, and that he is taking us down a course that is “foreign,” in the words of Romney himself.
It is one thing to find the president inadequately committed to the cutting of what you consider burdensome business regulations. It is quite another to say that he is a revolutionary who believes in creating economic hardship as a way to atone for the nation’s founding, which he views as “illegitimate,” according to Limbaugh.
Or to quip, as a South Carolina GOP operative recently did, that Obama is thinking of taxing aspirin “because it’s white and it works.”
How many times must a person be called un-American before it’s accurate to claim that he’s being accused of being a foreign cancer to be excised from the body politic?
How many times can a man be the butt of racist humor, likened to black dictators, or accused of seeking revenge on white people, before we recognize that those doing such things are race-baiting white nationalists in conservative garb?
How long, in short, before we call that which walks like a duck and talks like a duck, a fucking duck?
In addition to these blatant examples of racially “othering” the president, conservatives have sought to separate him from the circle of Americanism by suggesting his views place him outside the national tradition and render him inherently suspect. But to say Obama’s views—like believing the rich don’t build their fortunes on their own, or supporting slight tax increases on the wealthy—place him outside the national mainstream, is so absurd as to leave little doubt it is his visage, not vision, that provokes.
After all, Lincoln agreed that labor created the wealth of business owners, and that labor was “prior to” and “superior to” capital. It was Eisenhower who presided over some of the most significant government projects in history, like the Interstate Highway program, and under whose leadership tax rates on the wealthiest Americans reached 91 percent: well above that which would exist even if President Obama got his every wish on tax policy. And it was George W. Bush who spent money like a drunken sailor on a three-day pass for the projects he believed in (principally unfunded wars and a prescription drug benefit), all without incurring the “otherization” to which Obama has been subjected. When those men are critiqued, their location at the heart of the American experiment is not questioned. Their views on capital, taxes, and government spending all may provoke disagreement, but those are rarely conflicts in which these persons are placed outside the orbit of mainstream Americanism itself.
Likewise, though it is fine to criticize Obama for his approach to the economic crisis, particular critiques—like calling him (as Newt Gingrich did) “the food stamp president”—are calculated to trigger racial associations between dreaded others and the president. They know precisely what they are doing.
Just as they know what they’re doing when they blame the economic crisis, and especially the housing meltdown, on poor people of color who received home loans thanks to the presumed meddling of civil rights activists. It’s a claim they repeat over and again, even though the Community Reinvestment Act didn’t cause the crisis. Most bad loans weren’t written by CRA-covered institutions, and loans covered by the CRA performed better than others. But by connecting the meltdown to “financial affirmative action,” the right hopes to link white pain and black gain in the white imagination.
So too with their claims that people-of-color-led organizations such as ACORN were responsible for election fraud in 2008 and that such fraud may have stolen the election for Obama. The only fraud uncovered was registration fraud, which ACORN itself discovered and reported. It involved registrants filling out cards with names like Donald Duck, which is unlikely to result in actual voter fraud unless Donald himself waddles into the booth to vote. But by pushing these stories, the right manipulates white fear and reinforces the feverish nightmare that “those people” are stealing your country from you.
Though it may be difficult to remember, there was a time when movement conservatives, precisely because of the patrician erudition to which they aspired, tended to speak in measured tones. There was a time when the right sought to engage on the battlefield of ideas with rhetoric that, however nonsensical it may have been, nonetheless imagined itself the very embodiment of enlightened reason. Conservatives were like the prim and proper family members who told you never to speak of sex, religion, or politics at the dinner table. Even when they engaged in the most despicable forms of racism, such as William F. Buckley’s defense of whites-only voting in National Review, you got the sense that, however venal, it had been written less with a sense of hatred and more with a sense of pitying regret. Buckley, it seemed, really wanted black people to be civilized enough to participate in the election of public officials. It’s just that, as he saw it, they simply weren’t there yet. Offensive? Of course. And racist as hell. But when you watch him getting his clock cleaned by James Baldwin in a debate at Oxford, as you can (and really should) on YouTube, you get the sense he was almost relieved. It was as if from that point forward he began to take the turn that many years later would cause him to admit (at least partially) that he had been wrong in his support for Southern apartheid.
Would that conservatives today were half as introspective. We have gone from the likes of Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, who were bad enough, to folks like Michael Savage, who calls his liberal adversaries “vermin,” who should be “hung high.” Or Neal Boortz, who referred to the black poor in New Orleans during Katrina as “human parasitic garbage,” and “toe fungus.” Or Glenn Beck, who once fantasized about beating Congressman Charles Rangel to death with a shovel.
One wonders as to the source of their devolution. Perhaps it’s the shift from books—lengthy tomes with a pretense to depth—to talk radio and internet communication. Perhaps it’s because anti-intellectualism has so gripped right-wingers that they no longer expect or even desire their leading thinkers to have formal education. Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck—all of them either college dropouts or persons who eschewed higher education from the start. Or perhaps it’s the
