When I defended Obama last year, and argued that he was by far the better candidate, I annoyed a lot of people. But nothing provoked such ire as my suggestion that many of those who opposed Obama were motivated more by race than by abortion. And now, a year later, I think we need to come back to this point. For when I see the sheer lunacy of the right, especially when they protest, it seems that – deep down- they simply cannot abide a back president. Oh sure, there was the anti-Clinton nonsense, but it never reached this level of derangement.
Although you see the occasional pro-life message in the mix, this reaction has nothing to do with abortion. It has everything to do with Obama as the alien, as the man who should not be president, who is destroying the country with his anti-American policies. He’s a nazi, a communist, a terrorist, a socialist. He is trying to destroy the traditional American way of life. He is attacking freedom and freedom must be defended, with violence if necessary. If this sounds all too familiar, it is. These are the same attacks leveled against the civil rights movement a few decades ago.
Is it really a surprise that the most controversial political reactions to Obama in Congress last week come from white southerners in their sixties? It was Wilson who pointed his finger and called him a liar. And Clambliss told him to come to Congress showing some “humility”. Wasn’t that the attitude expected of blacks when Chambliss was growing up? And as for Wilson, it turns out that he belongs to an outfit called the Sons of Confederate Veterans, campaigned to keep the confederate flag flying above South Carolina’s state Capitol, and denounced Strom Thurmond’s black daughter for “smearing” him by going public.
The election of Obama has shown how the south is increasingly out of step. This is now the Republican heartland. These are the people who think Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, the people who think his health care reform entails killing old people, the people most likely to demonize him with ridiculous stereotypes, the slogans of a bygone era. Oh, and these are the folks our right-wing Catholic friends think are our allies in fostering the culture of life. Not only did the deep south not shift toward the Democrats in the last election, but Obama actually did worse than Kerry four years earlier. That I found very telling.
As Michael Sean Winters put it:
“But, watching and listening, it is difficult not to conclude that the strong sense of grievance, the idea that “Nobody’s standing up for us!” as one man from Tennessee put it, was not only to restore certain constitutional principles, but the social hierarchy that prevailed in earlier times, a hierarchy that kept blacks on the lowest rungs of society. No matter their degree of education, the most talented, educated black was still lower than the least educated white yahoo….Many of the virtually all-white crowd on Saturday yearned for an earlier time with less government involvement in society. But, that earlier time recalls, for many of us, the memory of states’ rights being enforced through dogs and water cannons.”
Or in the words of Maureen Dowd:
“For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.”
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