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Racist? Not Really
Sep. 17th, 2009 10:44 amSo, Jimmy Carter has stated that Obama's critics are racists. No, not really, not even the "Obama-Socialist-Fascist" Tea Party (tm) crowd. Now, don't get me wrong - there are racists who are critical of Obama. But the fact that they are racists is irrelevant. Obama could be black Irish and these same folks would still be upset. What the Tea Party crowd is screaming about is plain-old Democratic policies.
Yes, many of the Tea Partiers are making irrational arguments, from "death panels" to "government takeovers." But is that really any more rational than "black helicopters of the One World Order" that plagued Bill Clinton? Not really.
Nor is this a new paranoia. The unabashedly liberal Salon website has an interesting article about Glen Beck's ideological inspiration, W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen, who got his start finding Communists hiding under the bedsheets in the 1950s, wrote a book in 1981 arguing that America was going to hell. Now, don't get me wrong - there were Communists in America in the 50s. However, Skousen-as-Commie-hunter was like the stopped clock - right twice a day, you just don't know when. Also not new is the peculiar alliance between religion and conservatism. Jeff Sharlet's book The Family
outlines those links going back to the 1930s.
So, the crazy goes back long and deep. What's new now vs. Clinton's era is that there is more public acting out going on. Tea Parties, disrupting town halls, you get the drill. I think the reason for that is simple - the Tea Party group has some legitimate beefs with the Republican party. So, energy that in 1993 would go into having volunteers knock on doors is going into street protests.
It would have been nice if the "fiscally conservative" Tea Partiers had protested Bush's making a surplus a deficit, or the "socialist" and unfunded expansion of Medicare via the prescription drug benefit. But the same folks who marched on Washington on 9/12 were in denial. The events of September 2008 forced them out of denial. They could no longer deny what had been obvious to me since Bush's election, namely that the "country club" or "big business" wing of the Republican party was and had been firmly in the driver's seat. There was no way to spin the bank bailout as anything but what it was - socializing losses while privatizing gains.
So now, energy that would have been spent campaigning for Republicans is spent marching in the streets. Not only that, but the existing Republican power structure is forced to do what it had been doing for the Christian Right - pay at least lip service to their demands. It makes for a messy and noisy political environment.
Yes, many of the Tea Partiers are making irrational arguments, from "death panels" to "government takeovers." But is that really any more rational than "black helicopters of the One World Order" that plagued Bill Clinton? Not really.
Nor is this a new paranoia. The unabashedly liberal Salon website has an interesting article about Glen Beck's ideological inspiration, W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen, who got his start finding Communists hiding under the bedsheets in the 1950s, wrote a book in 1981 arguing that America was going to hell. Now, don't get me wrong - there were Communists in America in the 50s. However, Skousen-as-Commie-hunter was like the stopped clock - right twice a day, you just don't know when. Also not new is the peculiar alliance between religion and conservatism. Jeff Sharlet's book The Family
outlines those links going back to the 1930s. So, the crazy goes back long and deep. What's new now vs. Clinton's era is that there is more public acting out going on. Tea Parties, disrupting town halls, you get the drill. I think the reason for that is simple - the Tea Party group has some legitimate beefs with the Republican party. So, energy that in 1993 would go into having volunteers knock on doors is going into street protests.
It would have been nice if the "fiscally conservative" Tea Partiers had protested Bush's making a surplus a deficit, or the "socialist" and unfunded expansion of Medicare via the prescription drug benefit. But the same folks who marched on Washington on 9/12 were in denial. The events of September 2008 forced them out of denial. They could no longer deny what had been obvious to me since Bush's election, namely that the "country club" or "big business" wing of the Republican party was and had been firmly in the driver's seat. There was no way to spin the bank bailout as anything but what it was - socializing losses while privatizing gains.
So now, energy that would have been spent campaigning for Republicans is spent marching in the streets. Not only that, but the existing Republican power structure is forced to do what it had been doing for the Christian Right - pay at least lip service to their demands. It makes for a messy and noisy political environment.
