One Utah

Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s crazy ass claim that there are anti-American members of Congress, raving lunatics claiming Obama is Satan’s candidate for President, raving right wing loonies assuring us that the economic crash is the fault of poor people who want to own houses, right wing columnist claiming in all apparent seriousness that Barack Obama is a full fledged socialist (or communist they use the terms interchangeably), Sarah Palin’s mindless claim that she likes the “pro-America” parts of the nation are all part and parcel of a new and mutant form of American nationalism that is not exactly McCarthyism but that is every bit as dangerous and deranged.

The ironic danger of today’s not exactly McCarthyism is found not so much in the dangers it claims America faces, which are the febrile imaginings of a bunch of bed-wetting crybabies, but in the way in which they distract from the actual problems of the world. People who spend their time worrying that Barack Obama is a socialist in the service of Satan aren’t grappling with the real world problems of an economy in collapse, of rising economic disparity and social inequality, of not one but two failing wars, of homelessness and poverty, poor education and social despair. Someone whose primary concern is that Barack Obama isn’t a “Bible-believing Christian” has yet to grapple with the very real problems of the world in which we live.


FWIW, Crazy Tracy, as the person who posted this video to YouTube christens her, means well. She actually believes the standards she’s applying make sense as a critique of Obama. That her standards are utterly divorced from the real world problems facing America is equally clear. Tracy’s “faith in the Lord” won’t solve a damn problem.
It’s difficult not to see this year’s particularly vicious rhetoric as the natural outgrowth of the right’s old canard that liberals “blame America first.” (McCain’s slogan “Country First” is a clear rhetorical response to that belief that somewhere, some Americans “blame America first”.) From blaming America to being anti-American is a small step - at least in the minds of the people who think a large group of people gather somewhere and blame America first.

Conservative attacks on Obama - he’s weak, he’s dangerous, he’s a socialist, he hangs out with shady characters, he supports America’s enemies - are the same attacks Republicans have launched against Democrats and progressives for decades, attacks so firmly fixed in the minds of many conservatives that they use them even though they are in fact substance free.

Consider - just for example - two LTE’s in todays’ D-News:

First Gary Jaggi:

When the majority of a nation’s citizenry votes for candidates who promise the most government benefits, while requiring the least individual responsibility, then that country becomes a socialist nation. Socialists will win every election if the majority vote is based on receiving government handouts.

Socialism is defined as government ownership or control of the major means of finance, production, distribution, transportation and education. It’s also called “spreading the wealth.”

This nation is on a steep, slippery slope toward socialism. Citizens, please wake up and get informed. Vote for freedom, individual responsibility, opportunity and prosperity for all who try. A rising tide raises all boats. Please, do your part by voting honestly and responsibly.

Second, from Bradley Woodbury:

As one drives around the Avenues area of Salt Lake City, all one sees are Barack Obama signs. Are the people in the Avenues really so uneducated that they perceive Obama to have the judgment, integrity and values to be the next president of this great nation? Is an eloquent speaker really all it takes? Obama sat in the congregation of a racist and hater of America for many, many years. He kicked off an election campaign in the home of an unrepentant terrorist and signed a book for this despicable man. Yet when questioned about all his past relationships, he smiles and cunningly downplays his associations. Obama’s own wife has stated on several occasions that she has never been proud to be an American until now. And what about Obama’s intention to spread the wealth around? Isn’t that really just another name for socialism? Is this what America really wants?

As Jeffrey Feldman describes such fears, in discussing Bill-O the clown:

O’Reilly’s argument is a familiar one in right-wing media: Barack Obama may be anti-American not because he himself has said or done something anti-American, but because he has not repudiated strongly enough the anti-Americanism of other anti-American Americans.

In discussing comments by Newt Gingrich, Feldman observes:

. . . we see how Obama’s problem achieved a new, sinister dimension via Gingrich’s faster-than-fast rhetoric. The problem is not just that Barack Obama is anti-American, but that he might be a covert anti-American canddiate–someone who denies his own anti-Americanism in public in order to seize power and enact an evil plan full of–(wait for it…)–anti-Americanism.

It’s a crazy mirror world defined by the fear that socialists from sixties have decided to undermine America from within. Such thinking is connected to the “stabbed in the back” rhetoric about Vietnam, namely that belief still current on the right that America could have “won” Vietnam (although, like Iraq, there’s no articulation of what winning might actually be or what it would mean to win in the context of the real world circumstances). The fear - a real fear of an unreal thing - is that Obama and other liberals are in fact secretly anti-American (defined as not white, not conservative Christian, not straight, not traditionalist, insufficiently belligerently pro-American) and are cleverly disguising their true motives.

One sees a similar narrative emerge in discussions of feminism, gay rights, civil rights, education, unions, ACORN and so on. Adam Serwer, at the American Prospect, observes:

In recent months, conservatives have sounded increasingly retro with their attempts to paint Obama as a socialist or communist. In some ways, this accusation is typical far-right boilerplate. Obama certainly isn’t the first Democrat running for president to be accused of communist sympathies. And as usual, the accusations are rarely linked to policy specifics. But the difference with Obama is that, in the eyes of the right, it’s not just his political affiliation that implicates him as a socialist. It’s his ethnic background.

The hysterical accusations of socialism from conservatives echo similar accusations leveled at black leaders in the past, as though the quest for racial parity were simply a left-wing plot. Obama may not actually be a socialist or communist, but his election would strike another powerful blow to the informal racial hierarchy that has existed in America since the 1960s, when it ceased being enforced by law. This hierarchy, which holds that whiteness is synonymous with American-ness, is one conservatives are now instinctively trying to preserve. Like black civil-rights activists of the 1960s, Obama symbolizes the destruction of a social order they see as fundamentally American, which is why terms like “socialism” are used to describe the threat.

This phenomenon extends beyond Obama’s candidacy. The conservative explanation for the mortgage crisis falls neatly into this narrative, too; the country is at risk because Democrats allowed minorities to disrupt the natural social order by becoming homeowners. Never mind that this defies all data, logic, and history, the narrative resonates because it allows Obama, a living symbol of black folks rising above “their station,” to become a focus for conservative economic anxieties.

Serwer is too narrow in defining the anxieties as solely economic. Sarah Palin’s explicit claim that small towns are the real America is as much cultural as economic. The town she means is Mayberry - think about it, a town in North Carolina in the 60s that had almost no black people (I’ve never cared for the Andy Griffith Show which even as a child I found cloying and patronizing; I don’t remember any regular black characters on the show). Mayberry, where everybody knows everybody, where the biggest problem is the town drunk, all watched over by an aphorism spouting father figure with a gun. It’s no accident DiIulio described the Bushies as the Mayberry Machiavellis - utterly ruthless and utterly incapable and completely backward looking.

Conservatives (including crazy ass Michelle Bachmann) mean what they say. They really believe that small town life is the real American life and that the ethnically, religiously, economically, sexually and socially diverse world of the big city is anathema to “real America.” The conservative real America is a place where everyone knows their place and plays their role - where women work but they feel bad about it, where there are no gay people, where black people don’t get angry about injustice. It is far from coincidental that the Andy Griffith Show ran during the 1960s when white America was at its most anxious about black America. McCarthyism - and its modern day red-headed bastard stepchild - is all about anxiousness, about anxious whiteness, anxious masculinity, anxious Christianity.
In a world in which the enemy is endlessly clever, manipulative, and unscrupulous, the anxieties of McCarthy’s modern day heirs is multiplied exponentially, seeing enemies in every front, from library books to people who are too darn educated and who use big words, to terrorists, to sex offenders, to a mysterious cabal of abortionists and sex educators, to Christians who aren’t real Christians (in the video above, Crazy Tracy is claims that Trinity UCC is not really Christian). The terror that motivates them is a terror of the “other” so broadly defined that few can ever truly be cleared of suspicion. So surrounded by uncertainty, they embrace false certainty and hope and believe against all hope and reason that the demonic shadows of their own minds can be defeated.

This entry was posted Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), American People, Bigotry, Religious Fundamentalism, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.