THE PLANK SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
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Now that race has "entered the debate" about opposition to President Obama--Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering"--you are likely to see conservatives make some version of the following argument (turn on Fox for even five minutes and you are guaranteed to see it). Here is Victor Davis Hanson:
In the wake of Joe Wilson's crude outburst, many network commentators (and Jimmy Carter, of course) are weighing in on the new racism that supposedly explains 1) rising opposition to Obamacare and 2) the president's sinking polls. I think this is a disastrous political move to save a health-care plan that simply has not appealed to a majority of Americans. I suspect it will result in another 5-point poll slide.
It is beside the point whether or not this is true. What is interesting is that Hanson believes five percent of America will hear Jimmy Carter acuse white people of racism and then react by ending their support of Obama. Does Hanson realize that this is an insult to those 5% of Americans? Maybe Hanson is right and they deserve the insult, but I doubt he sees it that way. Rather, he (along with a number of conservatives) finds it perfectly natural (and very far from racist) to react to the charge of racism by, in essence, moving rightward. If someone claimed that my political beliefs flucuated over such things, I might suspect that I was being called petty or reactionary, and resent the charge. But no, apparently this is a compliment.
1 comments
I think what is particularly prescient to note about the Joe Wilson affair is how he became a media darling of the right practically overnight. So, lots of other relatively obscure racist conservatives out there [now in the closet] have got to be thinking: "What outrageous thing can I say or do to make myself an overnight sensation...a political celebrity worshipped and adored by "the base"?!!" And maybe even cash in on it!!! They will start to tiptoe out of the closet. Increasingly, they will get bolder and bolder by saying more flagrant, less euphemistic things. The art of the circuitous, oblique reference will become the artless, inexact science of political lubricity. And those who once embraced the "wink, then nod vigorously" school of racism [as a knee-jerk reflection of political expediency] will start to wink less and less as it no longer becomes necessary. Codewords will eventually be dropped altogether and the southern strategy in the GOP will give way to the "take our country back!" rhetoric of Fox News and talk radio. Take it back from THEM. But: As I noted previously, the growth of this more shrill [and increasingly dangerous] agenda is still largely dependant on what unfolds in both the economy and the terrorists agenda. If the economy does not implode into a full blown depression [as it appears less and less likely to do---here and now] and there are no more terrorist attcks, the reactionaries will have less and less traction on the gorund to ply their scapgoating by way of Wall Street agenda. But if the economy lurches back down into the sinkhole [or unemployment stays at 10% for months on end] AND there is another attack on the homeland all the Keith Olbermann Special Comments in the world won't stop the reactionaries from getting bolder and bolder on the road to the fouth reich in America. george walton
- iambiguous
September 16, 2009 at 1:31pm