Friend of the website Werner Herzog's Bear is like a great independent wrestler or underground band that folks in the know appreciate and love. I keep telling him to write up a submission for the New York Times. He is modest. Smart people often have that quiet confidence. This recent essay on the tumult and troubles of America in the era of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matters, and the second Gilded Age is essential. It is very timely and on point, a wonderful contrast to the mess written by too many among the so-called "smart people" chattering classes who lack any substantive training and expertise on American history, politics, life, and society.
I kneel before Zod. What follows is some on point and smart analysis and writing.
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As I feared, the horrible murder of five police officers in Dallas is being exploited by Fox News and the right wing media to delegitimize and tear down the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a golden oldie from the reactionary playbook, whereby an incident of violence by a lone extremist is used as justification to crush movements for social change.
One example from the past is quite constructive in this regard. In 1886 workers were pushing for an 8 hour day, in the United States through the fast-growing Knights of Labor. They chose May 1 as their day of action, the reason why that day honors labor around the world (though not officially in the United States.) In Chicago striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works clashed with strike-breakers, and the Chicago started shooting, killing some of the workers. In response to this police brutality, a protest was organized at the Haymarket in downtown Chicago on May 4th. As that protest was breaking up, someone threw a bomb at the police, who then started firing wildly. After the smoke cleared, seven police officers and a handful of protestors were dead (some from the bomb, some from the bullets.)
The so-called "social question" had been a burning issue in Gilded Age America, with many clashes between workers and the authorities. The bombing presented the reactionary elements with the perfect opportunity. Immediately local governments started cracking down on and harassing the Knights of Labor, pretty much breaking an organization that had grown to over half a million members. The nation's first national labor organization was now in ruins, and not just because of government action. The press fanned the flames, painting the entire movement for workers' rights as merely a vehicle for radical anarchists. The picture at the top of this post is a good example of the propaganda that misrepresented the event in order to stir up fear.
Soon enough too the police rounded up eight Chicago anarchists and they were charged and convicted for the bombing with scant evidence. Four were put to death, one killed himself in jail. Governor John Altgeld, in an act of true political bravery, pardoned the last three due to the shoddy nature of their conviction, and in the process knowingly doomed his chances at re-election. That would not bring the five dead back, of course. In the hysteria after the bombing, anyone with a leftist political bent was considered guilty.
This same work has been done more subtly by less partisan outlets. For example, media keeps bringing up 9/11, saying this event is the worst attack on police since 9/11, etc, when the scale is obviously so different. Also, we didn't hear 9/11 comparisons after Charleston or Orlando, which is telling about their use in this case. Implicitly, the notion would be that those supposedly responsible for Dallas must be treated like those responsible for 9/11. The witch hunters have their torches ready.
It took years for the labor movement to recover from the Haymarket Affair. We cannot afford a similar hit to the movement against racist policing, because lives will be lost. It's time to sound the alarm and get out there and combat the false narrative of Dallas before it's too late.
Friend of the site, the indispensable Werner Herzog's Bear, has an excellent essay about the Syrian refugee crisis and American nativism that folks should read. I have posted it below. As always, Mr. Bear's website Notes from the Ironbound is a gem. The work he does there deserves much more attention. If you have not, please do seek it out, share the site with others, and send him some love.
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Yesterday will go down as a dark day in American history. As the world faces one of the worst humanitarian crises yet known, several American politicians went out of their way to attack some of the world's most vulnerable people, continually competing to be the most cruel. Chris Christie laid down the trump card (pun intended) by declaring that even orphans under the age of five would be banned from my state of New Jersey. The spectacle of elected politicians currying favor with the bigoted masses by pissing on war orphans, the group of people in the world most in need of protection, completely sickened me. My students often ask how American turned back Jewish refugees -even children- in the 1930s. Now I guess they'll know.
Unfortunately, liberals have responded to this onslaught of noxious nationalism with a decent amount of naivete. They assert that the governors don't have the power to ban certain classes of immigrants, and that's true, but that's really beside the point. Also, I have heard it said many times that this state-sanctioned hatred is "un-American."
Oh, how I wish that were true. However, if you look at American history, you'll find that this kind of hatred is as American as apple pie. We have a lot of myths we tell ourselves about our country, and one of the biggest is that "America is a nation of immigrants." Never mind that most people of African descent in this country did not have ancestors who came here willingly, or that plenty of folks here are Native Americans. And just because most people who live here are descended from immigrants doesn't mean that immigration was always welcomed, valued, or free and equal.
Just look at the Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first important pieces of immigration legislation. It limited citizenship to those who were "free white persons." One year before the passage of the Bill of Rights, those vaunted rights were effectively being limited to white men. When waves of Irish immigrants came over in the mid-1800s, they were feared and hated, commonly depicted as ape-like by native born whites. This new surge in migrants gave birth to a nativist party, the Know-Nothings, who coincidentally were one of the elements that formed the nascent Republican party in the 1850s. These nativists didn't just spread hate, they burned Catholic churches, and instigated anti-immigrant riots.
Werner Herzog's Bear, my friend, historian, very smart man, and proprietor of the blog Notes from the Ironbound has a new essay on Donald Trumpmania and American Right-wing politics. I agree with Werner Herzog's Bear's analysis: it is easy and tempting to call Trump a fascist by looking abroad for his political forefathers.
[Is this habit some type of ironic anti-American Exceptionalism?]
Moreover, it is very tempting to call Trump a fascist precisely because so many in the commentariat are eager to throw that language around without parsing out its definition and attributes. They want to carpet bomb the whole area. But, the enemy may be burrowed deep underground. The target survives. I have several essays on Donald Trump and related matters forthcoming. One of the concepts I have been returning to in my thinking about the Republican human zoo in this political moment--and the language that the media summons to describe it--is "historical specificity". This concept is deceptively simple, i.e. what particular material and social arrangements have produced the dynamics of this particular point in time. However, historical specificity can also be a very challenging concept because the best "critical theory" takes the unseen and the assumed and lays them bare for analysis.
Werner does some good thinking here, as he always does, which is why I was moved to share "America Has Its Own Antecedents For Trump".
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It's been interesting to see folks (many of whom I am a big fan of) draw comparisons between Trump and Mussolini. Trump fits the fascist bill in their estimation (and mine) because:
His appeal to nationalism, fascism's key ingredient
His naming of internal enemies to be expunged for the health of the nation
His militaristic bent in foreign policy
His misognyny
His authoritarian proposals and demeanor
His appeal to voters across regional, religious, and social class lines
His support of a strong (for a Republican) social state
His attacks on cultural and political elites
Trump is a charismatic leader from outside of the regular political world with a cult of personality around him
None of these things alone makes someone a fascist, but put them together....
We have not featured a guest post here at WARN in some time. I saw this piss poor article over at The Atlantic and had to reach out to Werner Herzog's Bear, our resident historian (who also writes over at his own site Notes from the Ironbound) for the assist. Here Mr. Bear proceeds to eviscerate and maul Andrew Cline's bandwagoning against President Obama for his now (in)famous "you didn't build that" line. As always, Werner Herzog's Bear delivers in fine form.
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The Romney campaign, flailing amidst their candidate's incompetence and manifest unlikeability has been resorting to misrepresenting president Obama's words, or just flat out lying about him. At the center of all of this is the furor over the president's "you didn't build that," line. When taken out of context, it might indeed be inflammatory, but context is everything. Here's the whole section of the president's speech:
"There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That's how we funded the G.I. Bill. That's how we created the middle class. That's how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That's how we invented the Internet. That's how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that's the reason I'm running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You're not on your own, we're in this together."
What the president was essentially saying here is that the individual successes in this country have been assisted by social and governmental forces. Apart from the uncharacteristically maladroit way that he tried to get the point across with the "you didn't build that" line, the message is pretty clear. It's also not all that controversial, since Mitt Romney said something pretty similar to Olympic athletes ten years ago. Those who are trying to claim that the president was saying that the hard work and effort of entrepreneurs are meaningless and that only the government creates useful things are just lying. Their claims are so outrageous that they are beneath refutation.
However, there are some who are willing to view president Obama's comments in their proper context and still take him to task for it. Writing recently in The Atlantic, Andrew Cline has attacked the president's words as contradicting the true nature of America's history. As a historian, I find many of his claims to be specious, and reflective of a simplistic, blinded view of American history that is fast becoming popular on the political Right. Invoking that idea of the past, Cline goes back to Thomas Jefferson to say that the government was created only to protect rights, nothing else, and that colonial society, without any help from governmental forces, had created the middle class, in contradiction to what the president said. There are some problems with these claims that I will detail, but the main problem with Cline's interpretation of history is that it completely misses the reality of American life at the time of Jefferson and beyond.
Cline's blindness to the realities of the American past is actually completely betrayed by the image below the title: a painting of the building of the White House in 1792 with its architects in the foreground. This benign-looking image masks the reality of the White House's construction, which was accomplished through the use of hired-out slave labor. The white guys in powdered wigs in the foreground didn't "build that;" they may have drawn up the plans, but many more unfree black slaves did the hard work of actually constructing the White House. It should be a reminder that this nation's wealth was built in large part on what Abraham Lincoln called "the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil" in his second inaugural address.
Werner Herzog's Bear, one of my friends and a frequent guest poster here at WARN has a gem of a piece (it is efficient, dense, and nuanced) on his new site Notes from the Ironbound that you should all check out. Yes, that is a poorly parsed sentence as you should 1) both go to his new website and 2) also read and circulate his newest post that I am shilling for here.
I have a few other guest posts forthcoming this week which all lead to my sharing a good to and fro with a colorblind racist. I have teased our exchange for a bit. Events interfered with my posting the dialogue. I will make a remedy soon enough.
Werner's analysis of the Tea Party GOP's place in American political culture and their misunderstanding of their own wellsprings is spot on. More importantly, he is one of the best academics writing about politics and culture in the blogging game right now. I don't promote lazy and raggedy folks so you know that Werner is on point, and he certainly deserves a much wider audience. Werner's only sin is not writing enough...which I hope that he will correct soon enough.
His essay follows:
The Party of Lincoln Becomes the Party of Jackson
I recently read Gore Vidal's Burr, something I'd been meaning to do for years, and now I've got early American history on the brain.
The Tea Party and others on the political right are big on swearing their allegiance to the Constitution and the Founders, but are typically pretty vague when it comes to the details. The main reason, of course, it that when they say "Constitution" and "Founders" they mean faith in a political Bible and its patriarchs. They possess beliefs founded in belief itself, rather than reason or any knowledge of history.
That tendency to reduce politics to religion is why Enlightenment thinkers on the order of Franklin, Madison, and Jefferson would cringe in horror at the Tea Party's illiteracy and wild-eyed evangelicalism. Franklin was famously comsopolitan, and in his later life was more at home in Paris than Philadelphia, unlike today's uber-patriots who seem proud of their provincialism. Madison warned of the dangers of political factions taking over the levers of power, and evinced a strong desire to keep populism at bay.
Although modern day Tea Partiers might appreciate his small government inclinations, Jefferson advocated a wall of separation between church and state. To top it all off, George Washington was a committed Federalist who tried to increase the power of the federal government, especially in his decision, at Alexander Hamilton's prompting, to assume the debts the states incurred during the Revolution. Ron Paul he was not.
Yet the GOPers still claim fealty to the Founders. Perhaps they do, but to the wrong figures. Our contemporary right-wing populism owes little to the founders, who mostly disdained popular participation in politics, and much more to the Jacksonian era. (This is of course highly ironic, since Jackson is one of the founders of the Democratic party!) Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers of the founding generation, Jackson and his ilk cared little for deep thought.
In fact, they disdained it, and saw intellectual pursuits as inherently suspicious. After all, how dare those pointy-headed know it alls tell us what's right and what's wrong? Whenever I hear mainstream candidates for president deny global warming and evolution, I think of Old Hickory in all of his bigoted ignorance, especially his destruction of the Bank of the United States against all evidence of its necessity.
Jackson's decision helped bring on the Panic of 1837, just as the misbegotten economic religion of supply side has left us with an impoverished middle and working class unable to spend the money needed to restart the economy. Like their dark ancestor, modern Republicans replicate Jackson's provincialized nationalism, in which the only people who count are "real Americans."
And last but not least, they recall his bloody-mindedness. Jackson was famous in his day for his willingness to take lives, from those of his own soldiers to a man he shot to death in a duel to the Cherokee who perished in the ethnic cleansing known as The Trail of Tears. Recently modern day Republicans have made headlines by baying for blood at presidential debates, from the cheers for Rick Perry's bloody record of executions (including a man, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was most likely innocent) and urging that those without health insurance be thrown on the dung heap to die.
I'd like to think that the dark spirit of America's historical id could be exorcised, but in a culture where consumer is king and criticizing popular tastes, no matter how idiotic and debased, meets with the strictest condemnation, Jackson's ghost will remain with us. Whenever there are fearful white people who want to maintain their privileged position and beat down on others to do it, he will be there. As long as the Tea Party continues to stoke the flames of racial resentment, he will be there. Truth be told, Old Hickory's bigoted, violent, provincial, illiterate nature will always resonate with more Americans than the reasoned Enlightenment worldview of the Founders.
Why the above clip? Because Werner Hernog's Bear is back, one of our resident experts for all times, and I would do a monster movie infused tag team match with him as my partner ready for a "hot tag" any day of the week as we take on the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin at Wrestlemania.
The Atlantic Monthly had a particularly sharp and insightful piece on why Germans are fascinated with the Civil War--and when they choose to play, the reasons explaining their choice to reenact the CSA in America's brother on brother conflict. I play in those waters but cannot swim in them. The solution: call up our favorite historian of modern Germany to get his take. As always, he never disappoints.
I really like Werner's essay. I hope you too do. As always please chime in with your thoughts, reactions, and suggestions.
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Chauncey recently showed me a couple of articles about Civil War reenactments in Germany and asked me for my thoughts, which as a scholar of German history I am happy to give.I had heard a great deal about Germans dressing up like the Sioux and living in teepees on the weekend, but never about the Civil War.As in the United States, German reenactors are more likely to dress up in Confederate gray (or butternut) rather than Union blue.
Before hazarding my own analysis as to why this is the case in Germany, there are some basic facts that need to be understood.Germans have a uniquely fraught relationship with their past; to be a good German means to remember the Holocaust and feel some sense of responsibility forcommemorating its victims.
This is not just a matter of lip service.The massive, recently built Holocaust memorial in Berlin takes up an immense amount of space in the center of the city, located between the Reichstag (the capitol, essentially) and Potsdamer Platz (Berlin’s version of Time Square.)Essentially, Germans have chosen to take some of the most central and well-traveled space in their capital city, and have devoted it to remembering Germany’s most shameful crime.It would be as if the center of the Washington Mall were taken up by monuments to the victims of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.(I, for one, would like to see such monuments in such a place.)Even the history before 1933 is often tainted as a precursor to Nazism, especially the period under the Kaisers.
It would be difficult to have any historical reenactments of moments from the German past, because they would be so difficult and politically suspect.Hence the desire to reenact the past of a different country.
However, this hardly explains the attraction to the Confederacy, especially given the fact that many German immigrants to the United States, including prominent military and political leaders like Carl Schurz, fought on the side of the Union.Even among the small pockets of Germans in the south, such as in central Texas, German Americans denounced slavery and the Confederacy both.
One of my German immigrant ancestors fought for the Union despite living in Tennessee.(On the other hand, I should note that German Catholics, like their Irish brethren, served the Union army at lower rates than the general public.That had more to do with not wanting to serve a society hostile to them and retaining white privilege than it did with love of the Confederacy.)Much of this has to do with the fact that many Germans, including Schurz, fled to the United States after participating in the failed democratic revolutions of 1848.
They had reason to fear persecution if they stayed around, and brought their ideals of democracy and equality across the Atlantic.
I get the feeling that modern day Germans are attracted to the Confederacy for the same reasons that the South has had plenty of apologists north of the Mason-Dixon line over the years: the false romanticization of the “Old South” and the depoliticization of the Civil War.In the aftermath of Reconstruction, as historian David Blight has skillfully shown, the commemoration of the Civil War emphasized reunion and the similarities between the both sides, something predicated on excluding African Americans from the story, and literally excluding them from important celebrations, like the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg(It was especially important for the racialized reunion to erase the memory of the black regiments which were absolutely crucial for Union victory) .
Fifty years after the Civil War’s end, its causes and effects had been depoliticized in the public mind.It was simply a “tragedy” without a real cause, a fight fought nobly “brother against brother.”That view has been remarkably resilient, and it colored all the Civil War books I read as a child.(It even creeps into Ken Burns’ famous documentary, especially when Shelby Foote is given free reign to put a romanticizing gloss on events.)
Once slavery’s centrality to the Civil War was removed from the story (and it still is in the minds of most reenactors today) a very southern rendition of the antebellum South began to insinuate itself in the North, and even around the world.This vision of the Old South presented a bucolic, orderly society full of genteel men and beautiful, virtuous women.Their human property did not resent their state, but were loyal and happy.It was a world of cotillions, hoop skirts, and mint juleps, carefree and pleasing.Of course, this is all complete bullshit.(I don’t have the time to get into all the reasons, but the fact that ten percent of the Union army at the end of the war was made up of black soldiers fighting to eradicate slavery, when black people were only one percent of the North’s population, just about says it all.)
In my mind, Gone with the Wind is even more nefarious a film than The Birth of a Nation.The ugliness of the naked racism displayed in the latter is obvious to modern audiences, but Gone with the Wind takes a horribly brutal society and drains away its violence while puffing up the hoop skirts.It presents a seductive idyll, especially for White people who secretly yearn for unquestioned mastery and racial hierarchy.
We tend to think of the romanticization of the Old South as a southern tradition, but it has long been embraced in the north.Although Margaret Mitchell wrote the initial novel, it was primarily northerners who acted in and worked on Gone with the Wind the film.It was a British actress, Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlet O’Hara.As the articles about German reenactors note, it was a popular book and film in Germany as well.Its vision of the Confederacy seems very much alive, and much of the attraction for German reenactors to dressing up in gray and butternut.
I see two deeper reasons for this: modernity and race.As far as the former is concerned, northerners and Europeans living amidst the upheavals and displacements of modern industrial life were and are eager to romanticize a pre-modern society like the Old South, and to eradicate its many problems and brutalities from their minds.That flight from modernity, which has a very strong and troubled cultural tradition in Germany, also explains the Native American reenactments as well.By taking the side of the Confederacy, German reenactors can thus fight the onslaught of modernity, as embodied in the Union army.Of course, seeing the Civil War in this way requires draining away slavery and African Americans from the story.
Race, of course, has a whole lot to do with the idealization of the Confederacy, in Germany as well.Most Americans are unaware of this, but one of the best selling books in Germany last year was written by a man named Thilo Sarrazin, who argued that the immigrants from Muslim countries living in Germany are genetically less intelligent than white Germans.(His more recent comments are even more inflammatory.)A growing portion of the German population is made up of recent immigrants and their descendants, with Turkey being the most prominent country of origin.
Despite recent positive changes, they have been excluded from mainstream German society, and have been the targets of violence.Germans have been very resistant to seeing Germany as a multi-ethnic state; even Chancellor Merkel declared multiculturalism to be a “failure.”I found that statement rather comical, since multiculturalism hasn’t really been attempted!In a country full of people lapping up Sarrazin’s racialized nationalism and blaming all of their problems on racial others, it’s hardly a surprise that many would be attracted to the Confederacy.After all, states like Mississippi and South Carolina included statements about the superiority of the white race in their declarations of secession.
This is not to say that all Germans who dress up like Confederates are hardcore racists.However, we should still be disturbed by such a phenomenon, since it shows how the past can be manipulated in order to support horrible ideas in the present.As a historian, I think we, in this 150th anniversary of the Civil War, need to combat the depoliticized narrative of the conflict which is so easily bent to the most odious political purposes.
We need to stress the centrality of slavery, as well as the agency of the slaves themselves, who did a great deal to bring the institution to an end.We need to stop romanticizing the South, and view it for what it was: not a unique paradise but one of many slave-based staple-crop plantation societies in the New World (just like Brazil, Cuba, etc.) reliant on unspeakable cruelty to its African American bondsmen and bondswomen.We need to remember the Fort Pillow Massacre and other events that show men like Nathan Bedford Forrest not to be noble warriors on horseback, but racist war criminals.
In short, we need to show history in all its bloody reality, not a fashion show drenched in sweet tea.It simply a tragic misunderstanding, the Civil War was a war between two competing visions of America’s future, and the vision that more fully (but not yet completely) embodied the American promise of freedom thankfully won out.The romanticizers and apologists are out in full force, we must get out there and expose their myths.
I am still formulating something on this maddening situation in Arizona. But my colleague Werner Herzog's Bear--efficient as always--has gotten something up while I delete and rewrite my own post.
So here is a Sunday thinking project for you all.
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Back when Denis Leary was still a stand-up comedian, he had a funny yet sadly true bit about the fact that it's only the good ones that get assassinated. This morning, as I was reading a New York Times article about the sad killing of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer by a religious extremist, I lamented to my wife the bitter irony that it is always the voices of tolerance who are the assassinated by bigots.
How was I to know that a similar thing would happen on these shores later this very day? The shooting in Tuscon is proof positive that violent extremism knows no borders in these strange days. We like to think of the kind of political violence witnessed earlier this week in Pakistan to be something that happens elsewhere, something committed by the "other." Although the ideologies underlying the extremism in Pakistan and Arizona come from different sources (the Taliban and New World Order whackos hate each other), their unthinking, violent natures are very similar. Unfortunately, so are their consequences.
Years ago this same man would have been ranting on a street corner, now he is only one of many fire-breathing hate mongers with a large and highly suggestive audience hanging on every blood-dripping word. Many people in this country attack Al-Jazeera and madrassas, claiming that they abet hatred and terrorism. Perhaps, to paraphrase a man that many of these same people claim to follow, we ought to pay attention to the beam in our own eye rather than the splinter in our neighbor's.
We are going to be hosting a salon on the 2010 Election debacle (and of course, if any of you would like to contribute a guest piece by all means email it along).
I am really tired of the banal observation that this election is "historic." Every event is historic--from getting up in the morning, to using the toilet, to ordering a burrito at Chipotle. I want some precision, a dose of poetry in motion if you would have it, in the analysis of current affairs. Stated in more high foreheaded fashion, I want some specific historiography in the claims and observations offered by the pundit classes on yesterday's Tea Party Republican rout of the Democrats.
This election cycle I pretty much stopped watching political coverage on TV, and even turned off NPR, because the punditocracy has become unlistenable. I am told by reliable sources that they are calling last night’s election “historic.” I think it is, but not in the grandiose way that they think. I contend that it was historic as all elections are--an outgrowth of larger historical structures, events, and trends.
First off, we need to be clear on something. When the economy is cruddy, the incumbent party gets beat at the polls. That, my friends, is a historically established trend. I really don’t think a majority of Americans intended to vote to allow tax cuts for the wealthy or for insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, no matter how many Right wingers want to see this election as a verdict on “big government.”
In fact, considering the situation, the Republicans should have done better! We keep hearing over and over again about the strength of the Tea Party movement, but some of its most prominent candidates, many of whom beat establishment Republicans in the primaries, were total embarrassments. Opportunities to gain Senate seats in New York, Delaware, and Nevada were lost, and the likes of Paladino, O’Donnell, and Angle became national laughing-stocks. Tea Party fave Joe Miller will probably lose in Alaska, and Rand Paul made the Kentucky race a lot less of a sure thing than it should have been. Here’s a reality that they don’t talk about on television: the Tea Party stuff plays well in states like Arizona and Texas, where the voters are already heavily represented by knuckle-dragging troglodytes, but not in the Northeast, the West Coast, or much of the Midwest.
This election has actually confirmed three already established historical trends: the increased role of big money, the importance of the base rather than the middle (especially in midterm elections), and the power of the Right-wing noise machine. Corporate money and the lies that it can finance via “independent” advertising has been crucial in turning the tide in recent elections, just recall the infamous Willie Horton negative campaign ad and the "Swift Boating" of John Kerry. The Citizens United decision has merely reinforced and helped to cloak an already extant culture of underhanded corporate propagandizing. This doesn’t even touch on the fact that the Church and King mob that is the Tea Party was seeded by wealthy wingnuts.
In terms of the elevation of the base rather than the center, Karl Rove had already engineered a victory in 2004 by throwing out red meat to the diehards. People forget that much the same tactic had been used in 2002 to great success. After president Obama’s election, the GOP faced a choice: work responsibly as the loyal opposition to craft legislation to deal with the nation’s worst economic crisis in decades, or demonize Democrats, obstruct, and inflame the fringe. They chose the latter, and it has paid off yet again. The president needs to wake up and realize that although a large number of Americans are tired of the endless bickering in Washington, they are not the people who go out to vote, especially in off-year elections. By doing everything he could to be bipartisan while spurning his supporters, he has helped get himself into this mess.
Last and perhaps most crucial, this past election has shown the great advantage that talk radio and Fox News give to Republicans. They basically have a mass media propaganda arm that acts like a private sector version of Pravda, filling the heads of their viewers and listeners with all kinds of agitprop drivel. Coming from and living in Red State America, I can tell you that Fox News infects the public sphere like nothing else in these parts. I have to endure it in my favorite burger joint, have been visually assaulted by it at the bank, and have even heard stories of it blaring at the local courthouse. In some parts of the country it is the only national news outlet that people have any exposure to. Fox and other media organs share a lot of the blame for the large numbers of Americans who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, that he (not Bush) started the TARP initiative, and that their taxes have gone up, not down, in the last two years. As HL Mencken once said, no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
My advice to President Obama and the Democrats? Stop bringing a knife to a gun fight. Start shaping your own narratives, start calling out the lies, and start standing up for the things you are supposed to believe in. Running away from health care basically delegitimized it in the minds of many Americans. To paraphrase the wisdom of The Staples Singers: if you don’t respect yourself, how the hell do you expect anyone to respect you?
The Republicans and the Tea Party are the gift that keep on giving. In one party we have quite likely to be mentally ill Christine O'Donnell, secessionist kook Sharon Angle, Republican Senators such as Glenn McConnell who attend galas (with happy slaves and auctions) set in the "Good Ol' Confederacy," and now a Nazi role-player in Richard Iott who dresses up as a Waffen SS officer for weekend sport. As someone with more than a passing interest in military affairs and issues of historical memory I was going to chime in. But, I am also practical.
Why do something yourself, when you can have a friend--one who actually has a forthcoming book on Weimar-era Germany--do it for you?
As always, Werner Herzog's Bear has kindly obliged us by emerging from his comfy cave to bring some sense to this tea party brigand nonsense.
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Like a lot of people, I was both dismayed and amused by the news that a Tea Party-approved candidate for the House used to spend his weekends in a Nazi uniform re-enacting the exploits of a Waffen SS unit in World War II. The amusement came from seeing a bunch of middle-aged, suburban beer bellied slobs playing dress up like they could have survived ten minutes on the Eastern Front. The dismay came from the fact that they were not re-enacting a regular Wehrmacht unit, but one from the Waffen SS, the military arm of the institution responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. Not only that, the material on their website claims that members of the original Wiking unit were just doing their patriotic duty:
“We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.”
As anyone who actually studies these things can tell you, the German military’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a war of racial conquest, extermination, and enslavement. Anyone who tries to downplay that fact, or to celebrate the perpetrators behind it, is either horribly naïve, deluded, or a closet fascist.
There are a lot of ways to analyze Iott’s participation in the Wiking re-enactors. On the surface, it must be said, is the ultimate irony that Tea Partiers have been foaming at the mouth over the supposed parallels between Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. To me, it’s increasingly easier to read those slanders as a desperate attempt to cover up the hard Right’s fascist tendencies.
Tea Party events are infamous for the participants dressed in powdered wigs and tricorn hats. Their mouthpiece, Glenn Beck, likes to pose in costume himself, and constantly uses a distorted view of history to brand Progressives “fascists.” As I have pointed out in the past, he took Thomas Paine, an avowed enemy of organized religion and a proto-socialist, and turned him into a Bible-thumping free marketer. Why did he get away with this? Because his followers do not know or care about the real historical record, just as Iott seems to be unaware of the realities of the Eastern Front. (I will actually give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s not a Nazi, he’s just stupid, confused, and insensitive.)
They use and abuse history in this fashion because they need its authority to give their blinkered worldview some legitimacy. Their ideas have failed miserably in the present, so why not create a false, idealized distant past where they worked? I think that professional historians like myself need to do a lot more to set the record straight, since Teabagger history not only distorts the truth, its funhouse of costumes and invented facts threatens to confuse the past so much that Teabagger fabrications will be accepted for reality. After awhile it does remind one of a certain political group that blamed their nation’s military defeat on a “stab in the back” from their political enemies and used the resulting anger to grab power for themselves. Gosh, I wonder who they were again…
As a follow-up to my alternate timeline of U.S. history as offered by Texas and Arizona, I asked our resident historian Wernor Herzog's Bear to write an actual lecture suitable for those guidelines. So imagine if you would, your children being socialized into this new truth. Ask yourself, what will be the consequences of this Orwellian, Christian Dominionist, Right-wing Conservative rewriting of history for how students will come to view their roles as citizens, neighbors, and voters in 21st century America? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? And ultimately, what type of future will they craft?
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As many of you know, the Texas State Board of Education is about to have a vote on its social studies standards, which enshrine a Teabagger/Christian Nationalist view of American history. As a fun little exercise, I decided to write out a lecture on the Constitution that conforms to the standards. Although there's a little exaggeration here, it matches the new standards much more so than what I teach now, which is based on the work of actual professional historians.
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Today class we will be discussing the creation of the Constitution. Last week during our class on the revolution we talked about the Articles of Confederation, which was America’s first form of government. It seems that the Articles just didn’t provide enough freedom, so the Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom, guided by the hand of God, composed a more perfect document.
Their convention met in 1787, in Philadelphia. I should have you note that while many important Founders were there, Thomas Jefferson was not. You see, he really wasn’t all that significant, after all. We all know there would be no place for a Godless deist amongst the committed Christians who were going to accomplish God’s divine mission.
The Founders had a lot of ideas and precedents in their minds when they met in Philadelphia. They’d read the works of great Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and wanted to craft a constitution that was like the Ten Commandments, the most perfect example that they could find. What better source for how to live our lives is there than the Bible? They had read some stuff from the Enlightenment too, but understood that most of its ideas led to secular humanism.
God’s plan included sacred principles like the separation of powers and checks and balances, which were intended to create the maximum amount of freedom possible. Most importantly, it established a federal system of government, which means that the states have the freedom to defend their rights and do whatever they want. Unfortunately, that principle would not be followed in later years, leading to the unfortunate War Between the States.
There was something for everyone in the Constitution. Even slaves, who had already benefitted so much by being rescued from the horrors of the Dark Continent at the hands of benevolent European slave traders, got rights under the Constitution. Although they technically could have gotten nothing, they were given the status of 3/5s of a person, which was very generous for the time. Don’t forget, even though some of the Founders owned slaves, no one thought what they were doing was wrong at the time. And in any case, those benighted Africans weren’t going to civilize themselves!
After the Constitution was written, the Founders realized that it could use even more freedom, and so they added the Bill of Rights. The most important amendments are the second, first, and tenth. The Second Amendment gives all of us a right to bear arms, the only thing we have to protect our freedom, especially when the federal government oversteps its bounds. The First Amendment is especially important. Because the very first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights is that of religion, that means that America is without a doubt a Christian nation. Last, but not least, the Tenth Amendment protects states rights, and if properly interpreted, bans horrible tyranny like Obamacare.
Of course, sometimes we take some of these amendments too far. The Founders never would have thought that the Eighth Amendment banned torture, especially when applied to Muslim infidels. It’s great that we have the Fourth Amendment to protect us from the government taking our guns, but it shouldn’t be used to protect terrorists and allow women to have abortions. Hopefully someday these perversions of the Constitution will finally be overturned, and the will of God made manifest through this perfect document will be able to shine fully once again.
It has been a while since we heard from our friend Werner Herzog's Bear. I can think of no better a moment for the bear to spring forth from hiding and devour Glenn Beck.
The boy has suffered a relapse. This time Beck's drug of choice is a bilious, poison filled, and twisted fantasy where Liberals and Progressives are a "cancer" to be "eliminated" from the Earth. As always, Werner is ready with a a special guest lecture on the real meaning of fascism, Glenn Beck's crazy talk, and why this is eerily frightening stuff:
Today I would like to talk about the way that the word “fascism” is currently being misunderstood, abused, and distorted in the public sphere. I’d like to start by saying that I do not think that any one political group has a monopoly on misusing the word “fascism.” The Soviet Union used it constantly to shut down its enemies, radical European students in the 1960s used it against democratic regimes, and it was certainly leveled carelessly by the opponents of the Bush administration. Basically, we have all agreed that “fascists” and “Nazis” are the avatars of evil, and to label your opponents fascists is a very effective form of political name calling. I think that unless you are talking about white supremacist organizations like the Aryan Nation, that the terms “Nazi” and “fascist” should be avoided, because they tend to shut off political debate rather than foster it.
That said, there has been a recent wave of Nazi talk that has gone beyond name calling to actually distorting the historical record. I am thinking specifically here of Jonah Goldberg’s recent book Liberal Fascism, Patrick Buchanan’s Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War, and various statements made by Glenn Beck on his television show. These figures aren’t just mis-using the term “fascism,” they are trying to rewrite history. For example, Beck has called FDR a fascist on his show, and has consistently called progressives fascists. Goldberg does much the same in his book, and has made the preposterous claim that fascism was a movement of the political Left, rather than the Right. Patrick Buchanan, taking a different tack, has just written a book blaming Churchill for the Holocaust under the misbegotten notion that Britain prolonged what should have been a short war. In Buchanan’s eyes, Hitler was a nationalist who invaded Poland only to unite Germans together, not to subjugate Eastern Europe under German rule. All of these assertions are ridiculous, but are deadly serious, because they are being used to push a political agenda.
As someone who studies German history for a living, I feel that I should set the record straight. Because it would take too long for me to go into all of the distortions one by one, I will instead go into what fascism actually is. From that we will see the problems with the current rhetoric, and how it is based on is a gross misunderstanding at best, and a piece of calculated political mendacity at its worst.
First off, we should have a good definition of what fascism is. This is actually kind of tricky. In the first place, fascism is not merely dictatorship, militarism, or authoritarian government. While the term “fascist” was applied to Francisco Franco’s regime, he himself was not actually a fascist, but a conservative authoritarian, even though many of his supporters came from the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. In my estimation, and according to other historians like Stanley Payne, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were the only two truly fascist regimes, while others, like Franco’s Spain, Vichy France, and WWII era Romania, had regimes influenced by fascist movements.
What is important to understand about fascism is that it is a revolutionary movement that seeks to overthrow the older order, not just preserve it. In that sense fascism was a break from prior movements on the extreme right, which tended to be more monarchical and clerical in nature. Robert Paxton, the great historian of Vichy France, has a definition of fascism that to my mind works best:
“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Extreme nationalism is thus the essential ingredient of fascism; you really can’t have fascism without it. Fascists wanted to purify the nation by destroying those elements they thought endangered the nation, and sought to make the nation great through military conquest. Fascists were also interested in mobilizing the nation, which made them different from traditional authoritarians; hence the creation of organizations like the Hitler Youth.
Furthermore, fascists defined themselves through their oppositions to women’s emancipation, artistic modernism, communism, socialism, and liberalism. They valued action, nation, violence, and cohesion. While they shared an emphasis on collectivism with Communism, fascists rejected the whole notion of class consciousness and instead substituted the nation.
Furthermore, the Nazi variant of fascism was fundamentally and almost exclusively concerned with the idea of race. Hitler placed German “Aryans” at the top of the racial hierarchy, and considered them a “master race” whose destiny it was to rule Europe. (This marked him off from Mussolini, who was not particularly anti-Semitic.)
The worst crimes of the Nazis are the direct outgrowth of their racial ideology. The Holocaust, persecution of homosexuals, enslavement of Russian POWs, and killing of the handicapped all were motivated by the desire to create a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft, or “racial community.” These principles were directly opposed to those of liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and socialism’s belief in universal humanity. When commentators like Glenn Beck try to say that “collectivism” is what defines Nazism, they are wrong; it is race. This is also why Buchanan’s analysis is flawed: Hitler’s idea of Volksgemeinschaft required that those “unfit” would have to be destroyed.
But why not take this from the horse’s mouth? Mussolini himself wrote an essay called “What is Fascism?” in 1932 that is instructive in understanding how fascism wanted to break from other political ideologies:
"...given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority...a century of Fascism."
Notice that Mussolini has defined Fascism in direct counter-distinction to democracy, liberalism, and socialism. The efforts by Goldberg and others to muddy the waters cannot overcome this fundamental fact: fascists viewed socialists and liberals as their enemies. Furthermore, fascists were most invested in enhancing the glory of their nations, which they claimed had been humiliated, something both Hitler and Mussolini did after World War I. From Mussolini again, we get the emphasis on national expansion and emphasis on the nation rising from humiliation:
“For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude.”
I provide these quotations for a reason, namely to show how wrong many of the people who talk about fascism today are about its actual nature. Now enter Jonah Goldberg. His book, Liberal Fascism, must stand as one of the most egregious abuses of the historical record ever written. Like others before him, he wants to pin the word “fascist” on his opponents, and goes to ridiculous lengths to do so. Here is what he has to say about modern day manifestations of fascism:
“Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Goldberg, Brown doesn’t have an education program! Furthermore, people like him are always criticizing the New York Times, the Democratic Party, and Ivy League professors of not being nationalistic enough! His understanding of fascism is completely facile. For instance, he links the Nazi anti-smoking campaign, to the contemporary one, as an example of “liberal fascism.” That makes about as much sense as calling Dwight Eisenhower a Nazi for building the Interstate Highway System since the Nazis built the Autobahn. His problem is that he thinks that fascism has any kind of expression outside of radical nationalism. As we’ve seen already, it doesn’t.
Goldberg’s larger project, with which Glenn Beck and others have latched onto, is to term fascism a phenomenon of the “Left” rather than the “Right.” In the first place, we should acknowledge that these terms are highly subjective. Secondly, their grounds for doing so are highly suspect, especially because I cannot think of a single scholar of fascism who considers it to be primarily a Leftist movement. Goldberg for instance, likes to talk about how Mussolini started out on the Left, but that proves nothing. That would be like saying that since Ronald Reagan was a pro-New Deal leader of a labor union, that he was a liberal president. Paxton and others agree that there are elements of fascism that have their origins in the Left, such as the influence on revolution over restoration, but that doesn’t change the fact that fascism in France, Italy, and Germany, all had their origins in right wing, radical nationalist organizations at the turn of the century.
All of this is borne out in the historical record, where traditional conservative elites in both Italy and Germany allied themselves with fascism, something they never would have done with communists or socialists. People like Hindenburg saw Hitler as a tool for protecting their interests.
You might wonder why I am so passionate about this. I am because these distortions actually dishonor many of the people victimized by fascism. The first people targeted and killed by the fascist governments of Italy and Germany were Leftists. Hitler, for instance, purged the Communists and Social Democrats from the Reichstag soon after taking power, and built the first concentration camps in order to imprison them. The Social Democrats were the only party in Germany after World War I never to waver in their commitment to democracy, and they suffered for it.
Yet today they are being lumped together with Nazis. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint did this recently, where he let this preposterous whopper drop, “we're about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy.” Never mind that the social democrats lost their lives to defend democracy in the face of Nazi tyranny. If anyone deserves to be credited with trying to stop the Nazis, it’s them.
So in conclusion, I think it’s time that we stopped the name calling, and certainly that we stopped playing fast and loose with history. We all might have disagreements over politics with each other, but demonizing one’s opponents with the label of fascism is inappropriate and unproductive.
During the next few weeks we will be featuring a series of "what if's?" Accordingly, you, our erstwhile friends and allies ask: Brother Chauncey, please clarify what exactly you mean by a "what if" scenario?
Remember when you were a kid and Marvel and DC comics teamed up and told a story where Superman fought the Hulk? Well, this is our version of what smart folks call either "counter-factuals" and/or "exercises in creative decision-making and imagination." You know that our friend Werner Herzog's Bear, resident expert on Glenn Beck and his twisted machinations had to get the first shot. In the following piece, Werner, historian par excellence, puts forth what Glenn Beck (circa frustrated senior year know it all in high school) would have written in response to a prompt in history or civics class. Enjoy!
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Glenn Beck, Esquire Sehome High School God Bless America!
Introduction to United States History Final Exam
Question: What factors led to the constitutional convention, what ideas influenced the Constitution’s framers, what principles of government did it express, and how has it changed over time?
Ever since God created human beings, they have wanted freedom. No country truly had freedom until the United States. The Founding Fathers got together in Philadelphia because they wanted more freedom, which they weren’t getting from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles taxed to much. They were like a Communist government. This is why liberals don’t like the Constitution.
The Founding Fathers were obviously following the Ten Commandments with the Constitution, since there are ten amendments. Part of it says that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. This means that the Constitution did not believe in separation of church and state. The liberals who want that obviously never read Thomas Jefferson. He wrote the Constitution, not them.
The Founders also hated taxes’, which is why they threw tea into the harbor. The Constitution does not believe in taxes. That’s why progressive fascists added the income tax amendment. Since the Founders’ were inspired by God, the Constitution is a perfect document, and not a living document. You can’t improve on what God inspired.
The Constitution is all about real Americans. That’s why it protects the right to bare arms and have militias. The Founders had some good ideas about this that we should follow. People who aren’t real Americans should only have 3/5’s of a vote. Why is this so controversial? I guess that’s because today’s liberals hate the Constitution.
The most important part of the Constitution is the tenth amendment. That says that the states can’t be forced to do anything they don’t want. The Founders thought the federal government was tyranny. This is why the fourteenth amendment is wrong a change, since it takes away states’ rights. I don’t understand why people have a problem with states’ rights, they have always helped real Americans from tyranny. Only Communists and Nazi’s are people who like centralized government.
Today we have disrespected the Constitution. Schools can’t force students to pray. The goverment taxes all the time. The Commander-in-Chief doesn’t like real Americans, which is very dangerous. Pretty soon the liberals put us all in death camps! They hate America! They want to drive the ship into the iceberg!
Even tho the Constitution was perfect, new issues are here now. So we need new amendments. We have to make sure only real Americans become president. The Nazi liberals want to destroy America! We need to stop the gays from marrying. If we allow that society will die! Maybe we’ll have another revolution by real Americans to get the Constitution back. Like the Founders said, sometimes the tree of liberty needs to get water from patriots blood. I wish I could use the chalkboard in the front to show you this.
(Note to professor: sorry about the tear stains on the test. Sometimes I get so carried away when I talk about our great country.)
The Republican obsession with Hitler and Nazism is a particular brand of mental illness that requires specific, expert training to diagnose and treat. Thus, I bring you our friend Werner Herzog's Bear, Phd, Md., and the man with the plan when it comes to breaking down the GOP fixation on linking Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
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Recently there’s been a lot of Nazi-talk in the air, the vast majority of it disseminated by hardcore conservatives, who have been known to display Obama-as-Hitler signs at Tea Party rallies. This week it seems to have taken a turn for the surreal. A few days ago someone at the NRCC posted a “tweet” with the much-used clip of Hitler ranting from the film Downfall, but this time with subtitles that had him speaking as if he was Obama. This week Glenn Beck also compared the White House’s recent tiff with Fox News to the persecution of Jews under Nazi rule. Most recently, Ann Coulter claimed that George Soros (a Holocaust survivor) was a “Nazi collaborator.” By now I’ve come to expect Beck and Coulter to spew this ridiculous stuff, but seeing it from an official GOP organ is something new.
How to explain this crap? Here are five reasons why the GOP seems obsessed with linking Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
Ignorant name calling
Actual historical knowledge about Hitler and the Nazis in this country is practically non-existent. Hitler has come to represent pure evil, and so calling one’s opponents Nazis is essentially a way of calling them evil. God knows that the Republican attacks have no basis in actual historical reality. As I’ve noted before, the whole notion of “liberal fascism” is a complete oxymoron and the opposite of the truth. Furthermore, the main ideological component of Nazism was racism. Hitler would have viewed Barack Obama, the product of an interracial marriage, as a subhuman. This is why representations of him as Hitler fill me with a blinding rage; not only are they hateful, they are a rapacious abuse of the past.
Calling someone a Commie doesn’t work anymore
Yes, Beck and co. still like to call Barack Obama a Marxist (this despite the fact that he won’t even consider single payer!), but the Hitler comparisons are made more often. Conservatives cried wolf so many times during the Cold War that most right-thinking people just stopped listening. The Cold War itself has been over for twenty years, so the charge just lacks power. It’s also patently ridiculous, since the Obama administration is willing to sign a health care bill without a public option, supports polluter-friendly “cap and trade” legislation, and basically sought the approval of Big Pharma before making a move on health care. Again, since the Nazis are shorthand for evil, rather than authoritarian, messianic, race-based nationalism, conservatives think they can get away with the analogy.
The Republicans’ actual ideas have been discredited
The GOP has to resort to name-calling because they have absolutely nothing positive to offer voters. Dubya put a hard Right agenda into action, and it turned out to be a disaster. Since the collapse of the financial markets, the praise of the free market as “rational” and the solution to all of our problems looks completely deluded (as it always should anyway.) Now, if the GOP was not a regional Southern party, but an actual national party, they would have started taking a more moderate tack by now. Unfortunately for them and for our public discourse, they have become as ideologically rigid and doctrinaire as a humanities department (yes, I can dig at my own kind too.) Since these ideas are extreme and unpopular, conservatives have instead resorted to name-calling and fear mongering.
Extreme Republicans can’t say what they really want to say
If you follow the political blogs, you know that every couple of weeks or so a GOP official gets in trouble for sending racist images over the internet. As someone who lives in the South I can tell you that the level of racial fear and loathing among Obama’s fiercest opponents has a great deal to do with the vehemence of their opposition. Basically, the NRCC can’t “tweet” the images of a White House watermelon patch that their operatives send to each other. Instead of being openly racist, they have sublimated their hatred into constructed images of Obama that make him out to be evil. I’m not saying that all or even most on the Right think this way, but a very substantial portion does.
This is all a smokescreen for fascistic behavior
What better way of covering up your own fascistic tendencies by screaming as loudly as possible that your opponents are fascists? When Ann Coulter called Soros a Nazi collaborator she was echoing the talking points of the LaRouche crowd, who are the closest thing we have in this country to a bona fide fascist party. Perhaps Glenn Beck keeps comparing Obama to Hitler because Beck’s own brand of messianic, “we surround them” nationalism constantly attacks shadowy internal enemies and has turned the tragedy of 9/11 into the 9/12 manifesto of national “re-birth.” (I’m not saying that Beck believes in an authoritarian government or is even a “fascist,” but that he talks about the nation in certain ways that are unmistakably reminiscent of fascism.) It’s not just a matter of rhetoric either, but of methods. This quotation from Nazi official Hermann Goering strikes me as particularly relevant to understanding what’s going on these days:
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
any country.”
When conservatives were in power that was their modus operandi. Now that they are on the sidelines, they have made the leader of our own country the threat, instead of terrorists. At the end of the day, that is what gives all this Nazi talk a kind of fearsome potential. If enough people buy into the idea that the president of the United States is the embodiment of pure evil, and that he is out to get them (a la death panels) the potential for redemptive violence is high indeed. For that reason responsible conservatives need to cut this shit out and disown those who engage in it
