Howard Dean made a wonderful point today at Netroots Nation that I want to expound upon.
On the “death panel.” “These town hall meetings are not about health care.” People angry for 3 reasons–Rs have been angry for 30 years and the leaders have exploited that–polling for anger points. Second–who is shouting their congresspeople down? Not the generation that elected Obama–these are the people who feel threatened. As they get smaller they get angrier. Third–a president they’re not accustomed to seeing in the WH. Change is hard.
It has been said many places that the right wing of this country does not handle being out of power well, as we have seen during President Clinton’s eight years and as we are seeing now during the first seven months of the Obama presidency. But it is not that they are just sore losers. No, they are just an angry bunch, a fact that has not changed in decades.
Read this right wing pamphlet targeting President Kennedy in 1963:
Sovereignty! Anti-Christian and Anti-American accusations! Lies about Kennedy’s personal life (yeah, he was a womanizer, but he was never married and divorced before Jackie). This could have been written today. It is odd that the conservative playbook has not much changed since then, but then again, they are conservatives and are against change, so why would they change their own smear tactics.
But why are they angry?
First, who is “they?” For I do not want to paint all conservatives with one big brush since all of my best college and law school friends are conservatives. And we have wonderfully civil conservatives here at Delaware Liberal that are reasonable and are willing to debate (Maria Evans, RSmitty, Joanne Christian, to name a few).
“They” are referred to by three names, names which describe three different crackpot conservative “movements” yet the membership of these three movements seem to be all the same people. The “Birthers,” who hate the idea of Obama being President so much that they cling to this lie that the President was somehow not born in this country and that there is a vast decades long illogical conspiracy to cover it up. The “Teabaggers,” a group that suddenly came to the conclusion that a tax structure that was begrudgingly tolerable throughout the last eight years under a Republican President was now, under a black President, the highest form of tyranny. And there are now the “Deathers,” a group ironically so opposed to universal healthcare that they will lie or believe any lie about the proposed healthcare bills in Congress, the chief lie being that President Obama himself will hunt down the elderly and disabled and euthanize them forcibly. (And I say ironically here because most of them just love the government run Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs).
These are not three disparate movements. It is one movement, with the same leaders and the same constituency, all having the same problem: President Obama.
And no, they are not just opposed to his policies, for it would be expected for conservatives to oppose a liberal President. But political disagreement does not explain the sheer violent and ferocious reaction. The death threats. The literal terrorism.
It is something else.
All three groups are nearly exclusively white, predominantly middle aged and elderly, and unambiguously conservative. It is a movement of the enfranchised and enabled, and yet they feel, and say, that they are the disenfranchised and oppressed ones. It is a movement that is not only angry, but celebrates anger as if anger has a point unto itself, without rationale.
When was the last time you had deeply conservative southern governors and states yelling about secession because the federal government was forcing things on them that they couldn’t tolerate, and making belligerent anti-federalism statements over the slightest thing?
Desegregation.
That was the last time America saw, on television, shouting white mobs and the threats against lawmakers, all explicitly intended not at debate, but as efforts of pure intimidation in order to stop the debate from ever taking place. That was when you had mobs of very dumb but very loud people weeping in front of the cameras that the fabric of America was being destroyed, though they couldn’t begin to actually tell you why or how, only that it involved black people rising above their place in the world.
Why are they angry? Why is history repeating itself?
Yes, it is because President Obama is a black man.
That is the only reason you have left after you eliminate policy differences. It is not about taxes, since taxes are going down under Obama (yes, there were massive tax cuts in that evil horrible fascist communist stimulus package), unless of course the right wing now wants their taxes raised and that is why they are so violently upset. It is not about deficit spending, for if it was, where was their anger at President Bush over the last eight years, and conversely, where was their praise of President Clinton for leaving office with a surplus? It is not about government run healthcare or supposed death panels, since conservatives were all about living wills and end of life counseling in 2005 during the Terri Schiavo affair, and indeed, the very same Senators decrying the death panels today were the ones voting for the death panels in 2003 during the prescription medicine debate, which, by the way, was not seen as a horrible evil fascist communist government invasion upon our liberty by the very same conservatives who liken Obama’s healthcare plan as such today. And no amount of facts will dissuade the Birthers.
They are angry because President Obama is black. That is all. Occum’s Razor holds that the simplest explanation, after you have eliminated everything else and no matter how improbable, must be the truth. It explains why the Birther movement is, according to several recent polls, shockingly a southern and conservative phenomena.
Anger over diversity and integration is nothing new. As I have said, the same was seen during the 1950’s, and that anger has only increased straight through the years. There is just this group of conservatives who long for the traditional days, where we were a white Christian nation instead of a diverse multicultural and multi-religious one. Are these conservatives necessarily racist? We can’t know but they sure sound like it when they use such horrible racial epithets to describe not only Obama, but any politician they oppose. But for years, we have seen their shrieks and we have seen a number of Republican leaders cater to them. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy to Ronald Reagan’s campaign announcement in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs explicitly screaming about immigration and we becoming a non-white nation. Conservatives, by their nature, seek to preserve a status quo they cherish, and resist any change to that status quo. The status quo for them is a white Christian nation, where minorities knew their place, and most definitely where not President of the United States seeking progressive change.
But if that is why they are angry, and if they have been angry for years, then why is it much more violent and shrill this time?
Because this time they have really lost and, while they know it, they can’t accept it.
A black man is President. That is a horrible defeat in and of itself. But he just did not win by a squeaker. He won in a landslide, despite the Palin mobs and conservative efforts to stop him. And seven months in, after their screams of tyranny and lies about his location of birth, President Obama is still popular, garnering approval ratings in the high 50’s to low 60’s. They know they are not going to stop change this time. Hence the vitriol and hate and anger. It is what they do. Conservatives have never been known to be accepting of change.
All of this has happened before…. but will it have to happen again? I have long said intolerance will cease as the intolerant among us die off. Is this the last long final battle that will finally bury the conservative notion of a 1950’s white Christian intolerant America? By their rhetoric, conservatives seem to think it is. Their anger has a “nothing left to lose” quality to it. It is like they know we, as Americans, are at a turning point. It is a turning point I have longed for, and that they have feared, for years.