Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Tea Party GOP Meme Alert: Destroy the Federal Government Cause It Employs Too Many of "The Blacks!"



Pat Buchanan is the unrepentant voice of the White Racial Id in the Age of Obama...he is so the trend setter and barometer for the Tea Party GOP on issues of race and white racial resentment. For that, I am grateful. Uncle Pat makes doing recon on his team oh so easy, as they hide their wicked pathologies in plain sight.

Last week Pat Buchanan blessed the public with two articles. The first was a great example of poo poo slinging Right-wing head cheese that included almost every talking point from the Right-wing in the Age of Obama. White racial resentment, symbolic racism, white rage, anti-affirmative action, Obama as anti-white, white victimology, yada yada was all there: Thus, I deem "The View from Martha's Vineyard" utterly brilliant.

The equivalent to Buchanan's screed would be having sex with a 13 year old teenager who read one of Ann Hooper's sex guides and had no practical field experience with the yoni: He knew all the points to hit; but the young Lothario lacked technique---groping and heated penetration that was frustrating to the degree that it titillated. But it was mighty enthusiastic!

Pat Buchanan doubled down with his follow up piece, "Obama's Race Based Spoils System."

This is the money shot my friends. One of the old school/new school white angst memes of recent note is that President Barack Obama administers a spoils system for racial minorities. He supposedly hates white people. As a result of his anti-white zeal, Obama has set up a system of institutional "affirmative action" to hand down goodies to the colored folk, goodies which are to the exclusion of hard working white men.

In its most crude White nationalist reading, the time of the Great Recession and Right wing austerity policies will lead to "black uprisings" as the Fed's budget is cut. In Uncle Pat's more sophisticated narrative, the story of "black and brown equals government employees," is a naked dog whistle that the U.S. budget should just be cut because it employs lazy "colored folks" to the disadvantage of "hard working," "real American" whites.

This is the 21st century version of Bacon's Rebellion folks. White elites have long known that they can motivate racially resentful white folks to act against their own class interests through appeals to the psychic wages of white supremacy and white privilege. Moreover, the feigned color blind policies of Conservatism do this work through the language of "small government" and "constitutionalism," what are ultimately ways of talking nasty about black and brown folks without sounding racist.

Conservative wunderkind Lee Atwater said it best and most honestly with his famous quip that:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

But here is my question. Is this new/old narrative of kill the federal government because it employs too many "darkies" just a system artifact, i.e. it exists in the political subconscious of Whiteness and Conservatism and can thus be harnessed without having to use the actual language of race?

Or is the "federal government equals employment for undeserving blacks and minorities" (and others, here meaning you lazy teachers and union members) a top down talking point, where opinion leaders like Buchanan, Fox News, and the Tea Party GOP's leadership filter it gravity-like in a daily message to the foot soldiers of the Right, who then reproduce and disseminate it broadly?

8 comments:

Shady_Grady said...

It's not either/or. It's both/and.
It is spoken from above and below.
The resentment is real and needs to be dealt with. It is a big part of the reason that the Tea Party and associated fellow travelers are able to be successful.

Chris Sharp said...

CD: I have to agree with Shady Grady (from Sanford and Son?) on this one. I think the modern version of this "system artifact" has become a "top down talking point" that is being used with brutal efficiency to stoke the flames of the current class/race divide in America. Unfortunately, I think we may slowly be returning to a time when people were less inclined to speak in "code" about these issues, and more likely to wear their racism on their sleeve. As a white guy, I have definitely noticed other white people using racial epithets more freely since Obama was elected, but then again I live in Florida, where they never really stopped in the first place, as suggested by my recent post about the segregated bar up near Tallahassee.

People like Buchanan and other conservative/Tea party leaders are too smart not to know what they are doing with these types of arguments and innuendo. And many of the rank and file Tea Partiers appear blissfully unaware that they are once again being manipulated just like the poor whites were during Bacon's Rebellion, the Antebellum South, the Reconstruction South, the Civil Rights movement, etc.

What I find particularly disturbing about the current media debate is that the racial overtones (or is it undertones) are no longer referred to by code words, as shown by Buchanan's articles. This will only further increase the racial divide in our country, at a time when we can least afford it given the state of our economy and the looming signs of real class warfare down the road.

In that sense I guess its just old wine in a new bottle, but this time, it is fueled by a vast right wind media empire and echo chamber that allows this dangerous message to be amplified and spread to even more people who are willing to run with the ball. Scary stuff if you ask me, and unfortunately, the Progressive movement seems incapable of effectively countering the message.

Shady_Grady said...

It's from P-Funk but I think they took it from Sanford and Son. So either way.

Chris Sharp said...

Love that P-Funk...where else can you see a black man with dreads in a dress leading the baddest funk band on the earth? No fear of a black planet here.....

chaunceydevega said...

@Shady. All praise the p funk! Yes, it is a two way street the meme comes down gets recirculated and then goes back down again for confirmation. One hell of a feed back loop.

@Sharp. History ain't even past its yesterday. But folks don't want to here that.

Henri B. said...

I don't know if it was from your blog but I recently read that blacks often choose government employment because of the stability it offers. It struck me because I had honestly never heard this anywhere else and it caused me to examine my motives for gravitating to government employment despite my hostility toward "the man".

Someone like Pat isn't interested in facts, and this might be a facilely drawn conclusion but remember back in the day when the fact that black and brown people were over-represented in the military became an anti-war talking point? Guess where we go when we get out of the military? The federal government. And as a veteran who is happy to see many other black veterans in Portland (the supposed whitest city in America) we're qualified and we earned those positions. The only "preference" we get is veterans preference. If Pat and his posse have a problem with that, they can always enlist.

On the other hand, it's nice to be accused of stealing JOBS for a change.

Henri B. said...

AND ONE MORE THING How on earth does he say with a straight face that what's happening to whites now (whatever that is) is the same thing that happened to blacks back in the day? Do they believe their own hype?!

Oh Crap said...

Or is the "federal government equals employment for undeserving blacks and minorities" (and others, here meaning you lazy teachers and union members) a top down talking point, ...

I would say it's a belief, now become an article of faith. AFAIC, this is why McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in OK, and of course why today's teabagging confederates hate the government.

The sentiment never went away and because of our 24/7 media, is only becoming louder and louder again.

I expect the 2012 race to be extremely nasty.