POLITICS MAY 2, 2011
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What a difference a day makes. On Saturday, American politics was mired in a loopy but degrading controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate, hyped in the latest campaign of divisive paranoia by Fox News, would-be Republican presidential candidate, the real-estate mogul and professional vulgarian Donald Trump, and a host of Republican hopefuls and hucksters. But, by Sunday night, the nation was hailing President Obama, who suddenly appeared to announce Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. forces. In his speech, Obama spoke of national unity in the light of the justice meted out to the conspirator behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For the moment, at least, the engines of paranoia have gone silent. Will the long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering, the politicized by-product of the war on terror, at last come to an end?
The current round of paranoid politics got started in the 1990s, with bizarre stories about drug-running, murder plots, and other pseudo-scandals committed by Bill Clinton, the president who first targeted bin Laden and narrowly missed killing him in Afghanistan in 1998. But the paranoia ramped up after September 11, as the so-called architect of permanent Republican domination, Karl Rove, then President George W. Bush’s White House aide, informed the Republican National Committee that its strategy for political power centrally involved exploiting terrorism. Only the GOP should be depicted as serious about terrorism, while the Democrats should be cast as weak and soft. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans campaigned with a vengeance on the stark appeal to fear—remember the attacks on Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran?—and they regained the Senate in 2002. Paranoia was gold. The strategy was applied again in the Swift-Boating of the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in 2004, in a multi-million dollar campaign falsely assailing the decorated Vietnam War hero as a fraud, coward, and un-American elitist exotic.
But, in the Bush administration’s second term, its policy catastrophes and political misfortunes allowed the Democrats to recapture Congress in 2006 and the White House two years later. Out of power, the paranoid style completely took over the Republicans. Glenn Beck revived the long-dormant fantasies of the John Birch Society and became a media star. Tea Party organizers blasted the moderately liberal Obama as the tool of a socialist plot. So-called “birthers” persuaded a majority of Republicans to doubt whether the elected President of the United States is American and instead suspect he is a foreign-born Muslim, whose entire presidency is therefore illegitimate. The peddlers of paranoia once again manipulated elements of the mainstream press into transmitting these views as if they were simply a plausible point of view.
There is some truth, alas, to claims that the lurid attacks on Obama have had something to do with his skin color. But the cycle of paranoia preceded his appearance on the national stage, and was deployed as a highly-effective political strategy that capitalized on the all-too-real challenges of Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. Now, suddenly, reality has intruded—this time with gratifying and not horrifying news. President Obama and his administration have achieved bin Laden’s demise. The menace of course persists, but a circle has been closed, and a spirit of relief prevails. But will bin Laden’s death end the cycle of malicious fantasy and political paranoia that has held the country in its grip? If so, the raid on his compound will have been propitious in ways above and beyond countering the genuine external threats to our national security.
Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday).
Articles on the death of Osama bin Laden: Dalton Fury on the near miss at Tora Bora; Lawrence F. Kaplan asks if we'll overestimate the importance of bin Laden's death; Heather Hurlburt on the reasons the U.S. was able to kill bin Laden; James Downie on the legal justifications; Leon Wieseltier on the celebration in Lafayette Park; Jonathan Kay on the emergence of conspiracy theories; Paul Berman on the symbolism of bin Laden's death in the history of American democracy; David Greenberg on the only satisfying resolution possible to the story of 9/11; Louis Klarevas asks if the loss of bin Laden will hasten Al Qaeda's demise; Jonathan Chait on what bin Laden's death means; a photo essay on how America responded to the news of bin Laden's death.
TNR Classics on bin Laden and Al Qaeda: Peter Bergen on the Bush administration's failed attempt to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, on the troubling merger of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, on Al Qaeda's revolt against bin Laden (co-authored with Paul Cruickshank), how bin Laden beat George W. Bush, and on bin Laden's activities before 9/11; Nicholas Schmidle on what the murder of a bin Laden confidant says about Pakistan; Michael Crowley on Robert Gates; David Cole on Obama's war on terror.
18 comments
"But will bin Laden’s death end the cycle of malicious fantasy and political paranoia that has held the country in its grip?" I don't see why it would. First, it's not as if Clinton-era conspiracy theories were tied to his bin Laden problem; second, it works. Look for "Obama could have done this earlier but timed it for Sinister Purpose X" or "where's the long-form death certificate?"
- frippo
May 2, 2011 at 1:48pm
One of my favorite historians (even if he did support, in a high profile way, Obama's opponent during the 2008 campaign). The answer to his question: not a chance, not if the Republican strategists have anything to do with it. I said Republican strategists, not Republicans. I suppose what Wilentz is asking is whether Republicans will continue to be lead by charlatans like Rove, Beck, and others, or will Republicans begin to think for themselves. One would hope, along with Wilentz, that OBL's demise will have a sobering influence on Republicans. Maybe even on the Republican strategists - not a chance.
- rayward
May 2, 2011 at 1:49pm
This article is a disgrace considering the author who wrote: Culturally as well as politically, Obama's dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats' basic identity as the workingman's party - one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries. Faced with the revolt of the "Reagan Democrats" - whose politics they interpreted in the narrowest of racial terms - "new politics" Democrats dreamed of a coalition built around an alliance of right-thinking affluent liberals and downtrodden minorities, especially African-Americans. It all came to nothing. But after Bill Clinton failed to consolidate a new version of the old Democratic coalition in the 1990s, the dreaming began again - first, with disastrous results, in the schismatic Ralph Nader campaign of 2000 and now (with the support of vehement ex-Naderites including Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West) in the Obama campaign. Obama must assume that the demographics of American politics have changed dramatically in recent years so that the electorate as a whole is little more than a larger version of the combined Democratic primary constituencies of Oregon and South Carolina. While recent studies purport to show that the white working class has, indeed, shrunk over the past fifty years, as a political matter its significance remains salient, especially in the battleground and swing states--states like Ohio and West Virginia where Obama currently trails Senator John McCain in the polls. One of the studies that affirms the diminishing proportion of blue collar whites in the electorate, written for the Brookings Institution by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abamowitz, concludes [pdf], nevertheless, that "the voting proclivities of the white working class will make a huge difference and could well determine who the next president will be." Teixeira and Abramowitz estimate that the Democratic candidate will need to cut Kerry's deficit of 23 percent in 2004 to around 10 percent if he or she is "to achieve a solid popular vote victory." By those lights, Obama, if nominated, is almost certainly destined to lose unless he can suddenly reverse the trend that his own dismissive language and his supporters' contemptuous tone has accelerated during the primaries Wilentz as much as anyone stoked the fever pitch against Obama in his fanatical devotion to Hillary Clinton.
- blackton
May 2, 2011 at 1:56pm
It's intellectuals like Sean Wilentz who contribute heavily to the politics of "paranoia." There is some truth, alas, to claims that the lurid attacks on Obama have had something to do with his skin color. Does he think that had a white male been behind 9/11 we would have acted differently?
- arnon
May 2, 2011 at 2:01pm
Did the US react to Timothy McVeigh with nearly the venom with which it has reacted to OBL, arnon? Not in my recollection.
- cspencef
May 2, 2011 at 2:21pm
...Wilentz as much as anyone stoked the fever pitch against Obama in his fanatical devotion to Hillary Clinton... This is wild. Wilentz was certainly vigorous in his support for Hillary and aggressive against Obama such he went past writing historically to writing strong polemics, which, I presume, he'd be the first to acknowledge. He can be rightly criticized, I think, for dressing up his polemics in the clothes of historical analysis. But to assimilate those polemics to the paranoia evident in some American politics--as evident on the far American right for example--is, as I say, a wild misjudgment.
- basman
May 2, 2011 at 2:32pm
It should be obvious that the killing of bin Laden is Obama's way of deceiving us into thinking that he's not a secret Muslim. Brilliant reverse psychology. But it ain't gonna fool us!
- dsimon
May 2, 2011 at 3:07pm
basman, do you remember that article that Wilentz wrote? And do you remember some of the rhetoric between the 2 sides in that Democratic primary? It seems like a lifetime ago and I think Hillary has been a fine Secretary of State who was ill served by her campaign staff. I will admit I was as guilty as others and said somethings about Hillary which were harsh, even if I think they were true(ish). This is the name of the article that Wilentz wrote: "Race Man: How Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Here is the inital graf: After several weeks of swooning, news reports are finally being filed about the gap between Senator Barack Obama’s promises of a pure, soul-cleansing “new” politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is. This is the language out of the fever swamps. No, screw Wilentz. If he doesn't have the decency to own up to his own previous writings then don't lecture me about others.
- blackton
May 2, 2011 at 3:30pm
I understand and appreciate Blackton's comments. I too was taken aback by the attack piece Wilentz penned during the campaign. I could not understand how someone, Wilentz, could research and write Rise of Democracy could also write the attack piece against Obama. On the other hand, if Obama can be magnanimous, so can I.
- rayward
May 2, 2011 at 4:32pm
cspencef "Did the US react to Timothy McVeigh with nearly the venom with which it has reacted to OBL, arnon? Not in my recollection." McVeigh was apprehended right away and sentenced and executed. The militia movement which had been growing started to fade away. Yes there was a strong reaction to McVeigh and had he been part of a terrorist network that used suicide bombers and other tactics that Bin Laden used the reaction would have been even stronger. Racism doesn't account for all evils in the world.
- arnon
May 2, 2011 at 5:02pm
Blackton I remember that piece and I think I have may have been one of its commenters. I just printed out a copy of it thinking to reread it, but it's 10 pages and I'm trying to have a life. Glancing at it, though, running through it head to foot cursorily, it seems heated all right but understandable as vehement polemics from a partisan in the midst of a heated campaign for next to all the marbles. I can't see how that piece, those kinds of pieces, by Wilentz, which at least makes an argument with reasons and evidence, as he see things, either: 1. likens him to the American political paranoia he depicts above; 2. or, in effect--your point--negates what he's here written: "This article is a disgrace *considering* the author who wrote..."
- basman
May 2, 2011 at 5:23pm
“Could Osama bin Laden’s demise loosen the grip paranoid politics has on America?” This is by now an old hackneyed theme: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” By Richard Hofstadter† Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86. Is American politics any more paranoid than those of any other country?
- arnon
May 2, 2011 at 5:47pm
Gee, I wish I thought of that. Oops, wait a minute. I did think of it.
- mlottman
May 2, 2011 at 6:23pm
Think of what, mlottman?
- arnon
May 2, 2011 at 6:45pm
Lately, arnon, I think American politics is more paranoid than in most eras, period. Some of us have become flat out nuts.
- Sophia
May 2, 2011 at 11:35pm
William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie" or "The pure products of America / go crazy" from Spring and all (1923) The pure products of America go crazy-- mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure-- and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum-- which they cannot express-- Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she'll be rescued by an agent-- reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs-- some doctor's family, some Elsie voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us-- her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car
- basman
May 2, 2011 at 11:44pm
I don't know Sophia. Try reading about the period when Jefferson and his ofes were fighting over whether to support the French revolutionaries or the Brits. Then there is the McCarthy era..... The internet makes it seem as if we are in a new period. There is a touch of paranoia in most political systems, but democracies because it unzips people's lips give the impression of being more so than other types of regimes. Then don't get me started about European paranoid politics.
- arnon
May 2, 2011 at 11:50pm
wouldn't itbe wonderful if we could at least get rid of the bottle on airplanes paranoia?
- kmccusker
May 11, 2011 at 11:09am