September 14, 2009, 5:31 pm
Rep. Joe Wilson’s two-word shout-out at the president last Wednesday has unleashed a torrent of words from pundits, bloggers and talking heads. But one word in particular has been the beneficiary of his outburst: racism. Now everyone wants to talk about it.
“Democrats see race factor for Barack Obama foes” is the headline story on Politico today.
In her Sunday Times column, Maureen Dowd gave up on her resistance to linking racism and the opposition.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
For many in the blogosphere, it was a welcome column. “Dowd found the courage to state explicitly what so many of us have been thinking,” writes Lindsay Beyerstein at her blog, Majikthise.
It’s one thing when liberal bloggers say that Joe Wilson has issues with a black man being president, it’s quite another to see it spelled out on the New York Times op/ed page.
Whenever some egregious incident makes headlines, we’re told this is an opportunity for a national dialogue on race that never happens. Finally, Wilson managed to shock the established media into broaching the subject.
“Kudos to Maureen Dowd for going there,” writes Josh Marshall today at Talking Points Memo.
‘There’ being some public recognition of what should be inescapable by now: that a lot of the more electric and intemperate reactions to President Obama come from people who cannot or will not accept that a black man is the President of the United States.
I think Dowd was right to see it behind Wednesday night’s outburst from Rep. Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina, a man previously best known as one of the last hold-outs for keeping the confederate flag flying over the Capitol in South Carolina. And you didn’t have to wait for the night of the speech though. The day before the speech, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) of Georgia said Obama needed to show some “humility” when he showed up on Capitol Hill Wednesday night. I’ve heard presidents criticized, pilloried, even [vilified] for lots of things. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard one warned to show some humility.
It’s no accident that both comments came from white men from the Deep South in their early to mid-60s. I won’t say because I don’t think this is all the GOP, just as I don’t think that all the opposition to Obama is rooted in atavism and paranoia. But it is a big chunk of it. And it’s the ‘chunk’ that’s got the voice at the moment and increasingly seems to be calling the shots.
For many on the right, though, charges of racism are nothing more than the Democrats’ standard operating procedure. Peter Wehner says he predicted exactly this outcome back in January, “once Obama goes down in the polls and he does things that elicit criticism, be prepared for the ‘race card’ to be played.”
Now along comes Maureen Dowd, that profound social critic for the New York Times, who asserts that, yes, racism explains Republican opposition to President Obama. . . .
I have written on why I believe that what Wilson said was wrong and troubling and that he was right to apologize to President Obama. But the feigned fury on the Left is hard to take seriously. And the charges of racism we are now seeing are evidence of a movement that is getting a bit desperate and more than a bit angry. The trouble is that throwing around the term racism with such promiscuity dilutes the charge and makes it less potent when it is really needed. It is yet one more example of the harmful effects of contemporary liberalism.
Count Victor Davis Hanson in the same camp. “Maureen Dowd wrote another unfortunate, poorly argued, and thinly researched column yesterday,” he writes at National Review.
She alleges that racism is behind the growing suspicion of the Obama administration and its initiatives. But almost everything we’ve seen so far has a parallel with liberal attacks on George W. Bush. By 2005, Democrats were booing him openly during his State of the Union address. Rep. Pete Stark called him a liar on the House floor. In fact, the response so far to Obama is mild in comparison to what Bush endured. That does not excuse the boorishness of Joe Wilson, but his tirade is symbolic of our loss of decorum since 2002/2003.
As we all remember, novels were published outlining dreams of killing Bush; a film on that theme won an award. Al Gore, John Glenn (of all people!), and Robert Byrd compared Bush to a brownshirt or Nazi, and they were echoed in the popular culture by the likes of Linda Rondstadt and Garrison Keiler (”brownshirts in pinstripes”). There was no liberal outcry in response.
The Guardian published a sick column by one Charles Brooker, who asked out loud, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” Howard Dean, head of the Democratic party, raged, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.” I think it was The New Republic that published Jonathan Chait’s infamous “Why I Hate George W. Bush” article — imagine the outcry should anyone now do the same reprehensible thing with Obama substituted for Bush (e.g., “Why I Hate Barack H. Obama”). A play ran in New York called “I’m Gonna Kill the President.” . . .
The present poisoned atmosphere began in the 1980s and 1990s with virulent partisan attacks on Reagan and Clinton. But it was between 2004 and 2008 that the Left introduced a particularly sick sort of hatred to the political give-and-take, reminiscent of the lunatic right during the mid-1950s.
In this instance, there’s an unlikely agreement of sorts between Hanson and Glenn Greenwald, who sees more politics-as-usual than racism in the Obama opposition.
“Some argued that Obama’s race has caused the right’s hostility towards him to be both unique and unprecedentedly intense. That some people react with particular animus towards the first black president is obvious,” Greenwald writes in Salon. “But there is nothing new about the character of the American right or their concerted efforts to destroy the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency.”
To see that, just look at what that movement’s leading figures said and did during the Clinton years. In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that “just about every military man” believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.” The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible “murder” of Vince Foster. Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker. Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating “Whitewater,” a “scandal” which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define. When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of “wagging the dog” — trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal). And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal — in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique “distinguishing” spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child. More intense and constant attacks on a president’s “legitimacy” are difficult to imagine. . . .
Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right — and that’s been true for a very long time now. It didn’t just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don’t really believe in the country’s core founding values and don’t merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren’t part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn’t any truer then than it is now. All one has to do is review their behavior during the Clinton presidency — to say nothing of the Bush years — to see that none of this is remotely new. Nothing they’re doing to Obama is a break from their past behavior; it’s just a natural and totally predictable continuation of it.
Matt Yglesias is working a similar angle today:
“I think the crux of the matter is that since 1928 or so, the Democratic Party has typically presented itself in national politics as representing a coalition of “outsider” groups—Catholics & Jews back in the day, nonwhites and seculars more recently.
The actual identity of the leader of the coalition matters, but only at the margin. It could be a patrician from upstate New York or a war hero from South Dakota or a cracker from Arkansas at the top of the ticket, but fundamentally no matter who’s in charge the election of a Democrat represents the mainstream’s loss of power to the outsiders. Clinton’s win, notwithstanding Ricky Ray Rector and all the rest, still represented the triumph of the “cares what black people think” political coalition and thus enhanced power for black political machines. Thus the reaction to an actual black president is different, but not all that different, from what you saw previously.
A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s has a more complicated take: “A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.”
Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.
The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know.
It is Obama.
The right is projecting its shadow onto Obama. The same qualities that make him a saint to the left make him the devil to the right - he is easy to project onto.
That is why he is the out of control spender when they sat on their hands through all of Bush’s malfeasance. That is why his talking to schoolchildren is dangerous when our government wiretapping its citizens wasn’t. That is why saving the financial system from years of Republican regulation is taking away our future. The more evil revealed about the right’s excesses on torture, or wars of choice, or nearly destroying the economy, the more evil Obama will look in their eyes, as they cannot tolerate owning responsibility, because in their own minds they are only good.
That is why he is the Fascist/Communist/Socialist/Muslim . . . Racism makes Obama the Other, but shadow projection is an even more powerful (if interrelated) force than simple racism, and it is very susceptible to the mob mentality – think Goldberg in Orwell’s 1984. This will not end well. Now that Obama is carrying their shadow, only a dramatic event from outside could change it. . . . The more those on the right deny their own failings, the more their internal unease will increase, the more the hatred to Obama will grow, and the more the need to do something will increase.
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