Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner has an interesting study of conservative attitudes towards Obama. Their big point is that race plays less of a role in these attitudes than is commonly believed. I haven’t had time to read it thoroughly, but it’s interesting. I’ll have some more comment on this in the updates later.
Update. I’m on a conference call about this right now and it’s quite interesting. For example, conservatives that they spoke to didn’t cite a single Congressional leader as speaking for them; almost to a person, they said that Fox News spoke for conservatives. They showed very little enthusiasm for any 2012 candidates except for Sarah Palin.
The GQR analysts believe that tea partier/conservative base politics will play a much more important role in the 2012 Republican primary than they did in 2008.
Update update. Another interesting nugget: the GQR people say that the hostility towards Obama seems much more ideological and much less personal than with Clinton. In fact, the few good things conservatives did say about Obama were almost always personal — he seems like a good family man, his children are well-behaved, etc . With Clinton, the animus was primarily personal and less ideological.
Punchy
So instead of providing 70% of their hatred for The Negro Preznit, race only accounts for 50% of their rage. Good to know.
matoko_chan
Actually, they are equal opportunity hatahs.
A representitive for every hate.
Bob L
After all, those conservatives do have a black friend.
Legalize
OT, but the Quitta from Wasilla’s “book” is down to $9 bucks on pre-sale at Amazon. Presale. It was originally listed at $28.99.
Joshua
I can’t say I ever thought race was the big issue. After all, you saw this black helicopter paranoia in the 1990s, even when things were much much better than they are now (after all, Bush wasn’t President yet, though I do realize he became President).
The problem is that these guys just don’t believe in the legitimacy of anyone but them to run the government – and of course, “run the government” is sort of an odd thing to say there since they don’t really believe in the legitimacy of government, either. Unless its funneling money to their buddies and blowing up brown people.
kommrade reproductive vigor
No, their big point is it is totally unfair that their comments about him are totally unfairly construed as racist. Waaah!
Read the stuff on their fears of Obama’s hidden agenda. He’s scary, he’s stupid, he’s a Soros puppet and what about that burf certificate??
(I admit I don’t watch the teevee nooze, who is calling these people racists?)
Zifnab
Conservatives don’t have any overt problems with Bobby Jindal or Condi Rice or Mormon Mitt Romney. Hell, they elected Michael Steele head of the RNC. If there was a real line of frothing bigotry among the Republican decision makers, these guys wouldn’t have their jobs.
The right wing just likes using Obama’s race as another wedge issue to divide liberal-minded whites from minority voters. If Obama was white (like Clinton) they’d be mocking him for not doing enough for the African American community. Now they paint him as a racial insurgent, looking to give away the farm to blacks.
The Democratic Party has a lot of black people in it, and the Republican play book has always been to peal the opposition apart on the basis of race (and if they’re luck, sucking in some black voters for the GOP).
David Hunt
I’ve long been of the opinion that Obama’s race is not the source of the Rights hatred for him, but its outlet. The real source is the “D” after his name, so they’re going to hate him; the only variable is how this would be expressed. If Hillary Clinton had become President, we’d be drenched in misogyny and hearing about how she killed her lesbian lover, Vince Foster, to cover up how Whitewater was related to Travelgate.
I’m now going to actually look at this study…
neill
okay, i skimmed it…i think the pointy-heads dont git it.
none of these fuckin’ cracker is gonna tell them it’s race and admit they are racist.
shee-it, coulda ya kindly grant the lowly redneck a relative sophistication to register and adapt to the evolution of public discourse. it’s not like they’re all stuck in a time warp as rod steiger in the heat of the night — ya know…
they did watch that there teevee show with archie bunker…fer years…
they are, of course, gonna say it is obama’s hidden agenda…
“hidden agenda” the new code word. nice work, perfessers!
burnspbesq
It is certainly not hard to understand the reported lack of enthusiasm for the potential 2012 Presidential candidates. To call them a motley crew is putting it mildly.
Alan
Good news on the update. Hopefully Rubio will beat out Crist in the closed FL primary and we’ll get another Dem in the Senate. Go teabaggers!
srv
Man, can’t even get past the 1st paragraph w/o hearing about their victimhood.
Here’s what their socialist-marxist bogeyman did today:
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6ItnK32Cl6Y
Nowhere to go up but up from here.
Tony J
And…you…find…this…FUNNY?
You…are…a…dick.
I…have…certs…that…PROVE…it.
I…win.
Play…again?
Rick Massimo
I haven’t read it all yet either, but this jumped out at me immediately:
I really wish the false-equivalency fetishists among Our Media Stars would focus on this. They think they can just say “Well, it’s just the usual political attacks,” and they completely ignore (willfully? I dunno) that Obama Derangement Syndrome is based on the idea of a secret agenda.
We claimed that Bush was setting up a system where the president could throw people in jail without a charge or a trial because, you know, he set up a system where the president could throw people in jail without a charge or a trial. The conservative base lunatics say that Obama is planning to enslave us all and “destroy the country” (they never explain what that means) because – “Well, you just KNOW he’s going to!”
And the fact that there’s no bill or policy proposal that even hints at anything that would support that contention simply PROVES how devious and extra-legal he’s being.
How much of this is race-based? Some, I’m sure. How much? I don’t really care. It’s stupid-based; I know that, and that’s enough to eliminate them from any serious discussion of national issues. Which will never happen, because Our Media Stars think that encouraging Americans to think of revolution against a democratically elected president is an interesting intellectual exercise.
srv
Man, can’t even get past the 1st paragraph w/o hearing about their victimhood.
Here’s what their soshulist-marxist bogeyman did today:
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news…..ItnK32Cl6Y
Nowhere to go up but up from here.
Hunter Gathers
The sooner the the GOP suffers a Goldwater-type defeat, the better. And nominating Palin will do that. It will take a crushing defeat at the polls in 2012 for the GOP to begin it’s long, slow haul back toward relevance. Should make for excellent theater.
Bullsmith
Great, so Republican candidates for elective office will be even farther to extreme-insane right than the current batch. And 40% of the electorate will still vote for them without thinking twice.
David
@Legalize: The $9 price for the Quitta from Waslilla’s book is because of a price war between Amazon and walmart.com, who are fighting it out for market share.
matoko_chan
lol@Zifnab
tell that to the marines.
Condi and Michael Steele are “good” negroes, because they are republicans, ie the GOP owns them.
;)
ericblair
@neill: none of these fuckin’ cracker is gonna tell them it’s race and admit they are racist.
I read the report. The authors seem to have asked the group “are you a bunch of racists?” and they said “nope” and that’s good enough for them. I guess it’s a new angle. Meanwhile, they question how Obama could possibly have succeeded by himself without a shady conspiracy to put him there, and that “The word scary just keeps coming up. That is why I can’t watch him. He scares me to death.” What, a mid-forties tall, skinny guy with a grin and big ears?
The rest of it nails them down as your basic paranoid cult: a repressed minority with secret knowledge at war with a shadowy conspiracy where everyone else is either an enemy or a dupe.
Brick Oven Bill
Don’t believe the political studies you read DougJ. Go to We Surround Rochester tomorrow and look and listen. You will likely find that the vast majority of the attendees make no issue of human biodiversity. Teabaggers on balance are decent people who have been conditioned to not think badly of minorities.
Political studies that are released to the public always have an agenda. The goal of this James Carville report seems to be to encourage the creation of a significant new political party on the Right, splitting the vote, and further concentrating power in the Democratic Party.
Kit Smith
Honestly, that doesn’t really surprise me. I think the racism angle gets way overplayed because it’s the easiest one to fixate on because it’s incendiary and easy for lazy journalists to fix on. Add in a couple of people who either are racists or think that criticism of Obama is racism, and you’ve got a controversial article getting lots of attention (and driving traffic) without really doing any hard legwork. That’s not to say that there isn’t some legitimate racism out there, but it gets way overplayed because it’s an easy to understand rationale.
Without having read the report, I’d say it’s far more likely that the outrage machine gets fed by the fact that the Democrats are in control and there’s not much that they can do about it. I don’t think a lot of people understand how crazy these things can get. I had a guy who lived near me in the dorms at college (in 2002, after Bush was already in office and Sept. 11th had happened) who, when I told him I was a liberal, it took him over a week before he’d talk to me because it took that long for him to reconcile that despite my political views I was a pretty decent guy in person. Being a liberal or Democrat was the ultimate slur in his family and was cause for excommunication from the family.
Throw in an echo chamber of people who are more interested in portraying sympathetic viewers & listeners as victims of a tyrannic party (seriously, health care reform is an attack on liberty? A parallel public insurance program to the private industry destroys freedom to choose? To say I don’t understand these positions is an understatement) and the rage just grows. It’s not because he’s black, it’s because he’s a liberal, and while they normally despise liberals (not every conservative, but a not statistically insignificant minority), it’s even worse when liberals are “in control” and don’t feel like they have any influence.
It’s not necessarily hard to understand – think antiwar activists in 2003/2004 as the GOP steamrolled the Dems for everything. I know I wasn’t happy, but that I can say that the first thing that popped into my head wasn’t “armed revolution.”
matoko_chan
DougJ…the respondents cant SAY they are racists. Racism is a 21st century social taboo.
A more accurate sample for measuring the racist percentage of the GOP base is percent birthers, since birtherism is subliminated racism.
I think it is more than 50%.
handy
They’re doing that just fine on their own without Carville’s help
David
This does not bode well for a Republican comeback, thankfully. We will have a full-blown Club for Growth effect in place for 2010, where full-on crazy tea-bag candidates take out the remaining semi-sane Republicans and proceed to get shot down in the general election.
Nothing like another big election loss to push them to double down again on the virtues of conservative values (e.g., spying in your bedroom, big war spending, looking for lesbian teens in bathrooms, and lowering taxes for the rich). After all, conservatism can’t fail so they just need to keep trying. Someday the right conditions will happen again, even if it takes 40 years.
Brick Oven Bill
Does Rush Limbaugh read Balloon Juice?
Yesterday, the Balloon Juice comments section introduced the NFL’s clear racism against Mexicans. Today, Rush is discussing the NFL’s racism against Mexicans. This is the first time he has done this.
Napoleon
I actually think the wacko wing has a decent chance of getting Palin elected the nominee. They have a winner take all system and all you need are two establishment candidates like Romney and Tim P. slugging it out long enough to give Sarah a lead that is hard to beat.
kay
@matoko_chan:
No one is going to touch the anti-Mormon bias, but I think it’s interesting.
I think it’s interesting for two reasons: traditional media are not going to go anywhere near it, but everyone knows it’s there, and the Glenn Beck-Romney alliance.
It’s fun to watch from the outside.
Republican bias is so specific and sect-based it’s like a secret language. What does Beck do with this?
daryljfontaine
@David: Doomed to be a bestseller! THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS FOR JOHN MCCAIN!
Obligatory Teabaggers: I don’t want to say that the Teabaggers are fat, but when they surround Rochester, They Surround Rochester.
D
Wile E. Quixote
@Alan
I don’t have my glasses on so when I first read this I thought you wrote “…Rubio will beat out Crist in the closeted FL primary”.
kay
@matoko_chan:
“Huckabee backers least flexible”
They’re basically saying put my particular flavor of Christianity on the ticket or forget it.
They should list the approved sects, and save everyone involved a lot of time and bullshit.
matoko_chan
kay, the base doesn’t actually get that Beck is a mormon yet.
He’s been very quiet about it…there is nothing about it in the 912 project.
It will be hilarious when it finally dawns on them.
And you betcha Huckabee is going to play it if Beck comes out for Romney or Palin.
We might see a devils bargain between Huck and Beck…..but i dunno….a lot of WECs would rather vote for satan than a mormon.
James
These people are profoundly brainwashed. It’s remarkable. They literally reside in a different world than reality as we know it. It really explains a lot.
About the “racism,” James Vega makes the very good point that most of it is actually better described as “nativism” or cultural xenophobia.
Read his very good analysis here:
Democratic Strategist
Sam
First, if you see the name “Carville” and don’t immediately either become extemely skeptical or amused you proceed at your own risk.
As for the opposition to the Clintons being personal rather than ideological, until someone can identify something resembling an ideology motivating the Clintons (unless we allow “naked self-interest” to be considered an ideology) that’s pretty much meaningless.
Which leads to the unexplored subtext, people who both had a clue and were truly seeking to provide insight might consider.
As Obama is a pretty moderate guy, ideology speaking, would it be possible for the conservative advocacy establishment to convince even a hardcore rightwinger that a white guy who espoused the positions Obama does and spoke as non-combatively and appeasingly was in fact a left-wing extremist with an “anti-American” agenda? Is it just barely possible that some people might be more willing to believe these unsubstantiated assertions of a hidden socialist agenda because he is black?
kay
@matoko_chan:
I watched Beck shamelessly campaigning for Romney when Beck was on CNN, and got it then. It was glaringly obvious.
I don’t think it’s going to “dawn on them”, matako, unless they get this breaking news in a chain email.
Kathy in St. Louis
Don’t believe it for a minute.
Most people would never admit their true racial feelings.
That’s one of those things you talk about with your guy friends over breakfast, or a round of golf….not to some survey taker.
matoko_chan
James, it is easier to just substitute racism for birtherism and add that to the honest racists percentage.
Napoleon
DougJ,
Did you ever buy that book on the Spanish Civil War and have you started reading it yet? I had recommended the Preston book and the thing in that book that impressed me was that pre-civil war Spain was just like the present US in that my interpretation of what he was saying was that they had a significant part of the population that had taken on the exact attitude that the Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner report shows existing in the US today, that being that quite simply that the right felt that the government in the hands of the other political faction was simply illegitimate and anti-Spanish, by definition. My take away was that was when you get right down to it that was THE fuel that set off the Spanish Civil War, and we now have in this country the same conditions that existed in Spain at that time.
matoko_chan
kay……it will dawn on them when Huck dawns it on the WECs.
WECs== 20% of the electorate
mormons== 2% of the electorate.
kay
@matoko_chan:
Just for the record, I think Huckabee is completely ruthless. He’ll destroy Beck and Romney, and he won’t care if it means losing a general election.
I thought the media treatment of him was breathlessly naive. They have no idea. He’s on a mission. I wouldn’t get in his way.
kay
@matoko_chan:
I think church attendance numbers are inflated by self-reporting, just like I think diet and exercise numbers are inflated by self-reporting.
Everyone in this country goes to church every Sunday and exercises three times a week, for 20 minutes. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, but it’s TRUE!
No one ever has more than three beers, either. “Three” is the number we all settled on.
Bulworth
I’m sure it’s more about ideology than race. It’s Obama’s FEMA trailer concentration camp for Republicans, it’s about Obama’s turning a Bush budget surplus into a deficit, it’s about Obama’s Kenyan birth records, and Obama’s Muslim religious adherence. In other words, it’s ideological about all things that don’t exist. Or in still other words, it’s about race. And probably his (D) party ID.
Brick Oven Bill
It is my theory that people of different races are attracted to different political systems. Glenn Beck has gone out of his way to include black people in his events and on his TV show. But the only people who seem to be attracted to his Constitutional message are white and Asian people.
In contrast, Obama’s campaign used a Patriarchal theme, and he received 95 some percent of the black vote, and the great majority of the Hispanic vote. Jefferson got this one wrong.
The theory goes that those who evolved in the absence of gunpowder, seek the safety provided by an image of a male figure. Thus the Hope poster with the image of a male.
I can drink a twelve pack kay, and sometimes do.
aimai
I agree with Kay’s observation about Huckabee @37. He is ruthless and they will love him.
I also agree with everyone else who says you have to realize the way race and racism are encoded in other, more socially acceptable, forms of opposition. And I agree with Zifnab that for some large portion of the wealthy elite anti Obama group everything is, essentially, opportunistic. I think that racism and race are the language that jokes and attacks can be made on Obama, as well as elitism, anti Harvard, anti skinny people, and anti pouffy foreigners who prounounce Pakkiiistan as Pock-is-stahn. Every single one of the attacks on Obama would have been made on any other president, white red or green, with the added ugliness of any imagery or metaphor or joke that was also a slur and an attack. I mean, basically, if you can’t just discuss policy directly you are left with nothing but excitable hate speech. Its just the way their base likes it.
aimai
ericblair
@James: About the “racism,” James Vega makes the very good point that most of it is actually better described as “nativism” or cultural xenophobia.
General xenophobia and lizard-brain tribalism is definitely a big part of it, but the key for me about the study was the quote that just watching Obama “scared [them] to death.” It wasn’t ‘well, sure, he looks like a forty-something clean-cut soft-spoken guy with a nice grin, but he’s REALLY the AntiChrist CommieFascistIslamoTerraistAlien.’ Instead, it’s ‘I’m not a racist, but just LOOK at him ZOMG.’ Um, OK.
Rick Massimo
So conservatives are reacting to their losses in recent elections by no longer listening to conservatives who win elections. They are instead taking inspiration from people who do not face voters and who, if they are in elective office, quit to post on Facebook and bitch at people.
I can’t see how this could turn out badly for them.
Janet Strange
I read the report and then I saw this cartoon from a Pajamas Media cartoonist that ran last Sunday.
It’s like he made a graphic novel out of the report. Yet I’m sure he never saw the report – he actually lives it.
I’m one of those who finds this scary.
handy
In fact, I would gather you have downed a few already, amirite?
soonergrunt
@BoB–
What about people like yourself who have evolved in the absence of knowledge, culture, and intellectual rigor?
And as for drinking a 12-pack, we see evidence of this on a daily basis here. No need to point out the blindingly obvious, unless it’s to claim that it’s the beer’s fault and not your normal intellectual exertions.
Jack
@James:
This. It’s nativism. Which can be confused for racism, but is not necessarily identical with it.
Perhaps folks need to understand that a black, conservative war veteran would be very much embraced by most of the Republican wingnutter base – so long as that person demonstrated a public fealty to the clture in force.
Because the public acceptance of the dominant cultural norms of movement conservatism overrides, if you will, the Otherness which informs nativism and xenophobia.
It’s probably also worth noting that these norms did emerge in the plantation culture of the South, and in the yacht and banking clubs of the coasts. And that there can be no whitewash of the historical and racial conditions during which these root cultures formed, and which provided some of the enduring convictions.
But it’s not as clearly defined, for example, as French monoculture, famous for its rigidity – in which a more traditional European racialism still persists (see also upper caste Colombia or Argentina for analogs).
gocart mozart
Is this peak wingnut?
http://www.usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php
jibeaux
It’s too bad that the Republican version of Obama’s ideology exists only in their own fevered imaginations, or they might have a valid, logical, race-neutral explanation for their derangement syndrome.
Alan
Excellent Youtube video–a play on the iPhone app store: Republicans in Congress
batgirl
Well, yes, but they make it so easy.
different church-lady
ZOT!!!!
So, the modern right no longer has any compelling political leadership. Into the void has flooded media leadership. Thus, the tongue-in-cheek claim that Limbaugh is the ‘leader’ of the GOP gains some credibility, because he has a stronger emotional pull on the party than the politicians do. Actual political functionality has become secondary to emotional compulsion.
And the reason Palin is the only politician they have enthusiasm for is because she is transitioning away from being a political figure into being a media figure.
Basically the base of the modern right has entirely abandoned politics for image. They are doomed. The base will cry out for a polarizing, but unelectable figure like Palin, because their craving for emotional satisfaction will outweigh the pragmatic approach needed to appeal to the middle (who still care about actual governance).
slag
I’m sure Obama and his “Baby Mama” will be happy to hear that Faux News conservatives aren’t racist. Hell, they may even do a “terrorist fist jab” to celebrate.
Zifnab
@kay:
He’s also relatively powerless. The man’s got a cute little song and dance on FOX News, but he doesn’t have widespread support within the party. The guy came in a lackluster third by the end of the primaries.
Maybe if he could combine forces with Sarah Palin. Their styles, at least, sync up. I just don’t know how many people would seriously vote for them.
ericblair
@Rick Massimo: So conservatives are reacting to their losses in recent elections by no longer listening to conservatives who win elections. They are instead taking inspiration from people who do not face voters and who, if they are in elective office, quit to post on Facebook and bitch at people.
This is why I believe that the death of the Republican party in the near future is a good possibility. The core of the party is taking the parts that have proven not to work and doubled down on them, deliberately tossing out anybody who can actually get elected. It’s a vicious circle that ends up with a small core of identically-thinking nutcases marinating in their own self-righteousness and butthurt.
geg6
Sorry, Doug, but I think these researchers are nuts if what is glaringly obvious to me (that much of the fear of Obama among the nutjobs is due to race) is something they are dismissing out of hand. They self-identify as “not racist,” so they aren’t racists and their opposition to Obama is completely divorced from their racial attitudes. Oh. Really? They whine and cry that they are called racists but they aren’t because…well, because.
I am not enamored of the scholarship here.
anonevent
@Janet Strange: I wonder how many black men, and for that matter how many black men with white SO’s, are even thinking these thoughts?
thomas Levenson
@Legalize: Wow. I know it’s off topic, but that looks like what folks in publishing call “remaindered in place” — a book with so overlarge a printing that they offer it on deep discount (i.e. no royalties accrue to the author’s account) whilst still in first-run book stores.
It happens not infrequently with stupid celeb. books. But I can’t remember a book being thus remaindered before its pub. date. If this is really what’s going on, that’s something. Wow. Again.
anonevent
@anonevent:
Edit: It should be SOs.
Comrade Dread
Their imaginations. Or the voices in their head. Or for the truly disturbed, the imaginary voices in their head.
I guess we can chalk the embrace of a victimization mindset they claimed to despise in other actual oppressed minorities as yet another moment in irony. To which I’m sure they would reply, “Why would I iron my knee? I’d burn maself.”
LarryB
@Brick Oven Bill: I, on the other hand, prefer a good cherry pie w. cooked with a hefty shot of brandy.
aimai
I read the TPM account of the poll and the responses from the “real” conservatives are straight up Glen Beck with a double order side of nutty. You simply can’t say that these voters are “more ideological” and don’t hate Obama “personally” without taking into account that they are mainlining a version of reality in which Obama is, essentially, a nice looking Manchurian Candidate for some kind of hidden conspiracy. What’s not to like? They waver between granting Obama incredible mind bending talents and imagining that he is some kind of empty suit a la George Bush who was put into power by Mao/JomoKenyatta/OsamabinLaden and stalin. On some level they *have* to think he’s a nice looking fella because otherwise they *really* can’t explain how he got to the White House.
This simply has nothing to do with actual racism or racist feelings–that is, its not a *contradiction* of the fact that they are also, by and large, quite racist.
But I was especially interested to read the last part of the tpm story which was that Beck’s on air crying and his physical appearance of being a huge, overgrown, baby (I mean that literally) seems to be having some expected results driving his female viewers to see him as needing protection–that is, he is appealing to their maternal instincts rather than their sexual side. I think that might, ultimately, have divisive potential for some of his male followers. Its very hard to come on as a baby who needs protection to one half of your group, and as a manly man to the other half *extending* protection. But look to Beck to work the carney mid point and represent himself to his male followers as an aw shucks, everyman, geeky, proffessorial type who looks to them for protection because of their strength.
aimai
Joel
I always felt that race was a red herring here.
The real issue is power. These people cannot fathom living without perceived exclusive access to it. Cooperation with fellow citizens of different ideological stripes – the fundamental requirement of a democratic society – is verboten.
Adrienne
@Zifnab: .
Are you kidding me? That’s the stuff the GOP base’s wet dreams are made of!!! Palin-Huckabee 2012 FTW!!!
Seriously though, I’d actually pay cash money to see the VP Presidential debate btw Huckabee and Biden. Now THAT will be fully entertaining.
Tony J
Yeah, but that second subset of conservatives let the first subset down by not being conservative enough to push through the sensible policies that would have prevented ACORN from stealing the 2008 election for a foreign-born Islamofascist commie.
Now that ACORN has been driven from the field by their efforts, they have four years to concentrate their time and energy on purging the Republican Party of anyone they don’t like, confident that they’ll be swept back into power in 2012 with Real Americans on the ticket.
It makes perfect sense. If, y’know, you really, really want it to.
jibeaux
by the way, very very early on in the quoting of participants there you get not only to Soros but to ACORN. Unable to be parodied, etc.
Jack
@different church-lady:
I would normally agree with you, but I don’t accept as a given that the current social and political superstructure is so sound that it cannot be subsumed by internal pressures.
There are a few modern instances where confidence in the persistence of social and political norms was misplaced, perhaps most notably post-war Britain and France, Weimar Germany, Spain before Franco and the Falangists, Mexico under the PRI and the recent collapse of Kenya.
Uli Kunkel
“Despite the sign, Lanzo said he’s not a racist.
He said he’s just against what he calls a “sub standard healthcare plan,” which he said President Obama is trying to push through.”
Lanzo just wants a public option and his sign is a way of drawing attention to that. No racism to see here, move along.
ruemara
meh. as a black person, I think I can say without a doubt, blackness has a large amount to do with it. Your experience may vary. This study’s efforts to uncover it amount to asking the guy with the sheet haute couture and oversized cross match if he’s a racist, then say ok when he says no. It’s more of a tool to create wedges but it’s a big fucking tool and most of their hysteria is akin to the “if we give teh gay teh rights, they’ll start treating us like we treated them” bullshit.
Respectfully, we’ll just have to disagree on this aspect.
Linda Featheringill
I found the comments in the study on “hidden agenda” interesting. Apparently, they cannot believe that anyone would actually make such well-meaning remarks and mean them. Perhaps these people are so selfish that they just cannot believe that anyone would be even a little altruistic.
Joel
@Joshua: This, also.
Uli Kunkel
“Despite the sign, Lanzo said he’s not a racist. He said he’s just against what he calls a “sub standard healthcare plan,” which he said President Obama is trying to push through.”
Lanzo just wants a public option and his sign is a way of drawing attention to that. No racism to see here, move along.
(Your comments editor sux, BTW)
DougJ
Did you ever buy that book on the Spanish Civil War and have you started reading it yet?
No, I wussed out and just watched some google video documentaries and listened to “Spanish Bombs” a few more times.
Savage Henry
I can’t wait until the 2012 GOP primary. They are going to turn their guns on each other and the whole thing is going to blow up like a supernova.
Right now they are racheting up the hate machine to 11 directed at Obama, Democrats and everything that they consider the “other”. In the primary season, each of them will go to great lengths to put themselves forward at “us” and the other candidates as “them”. Romney is a mormon. Huck and Palin subscribe to different flavors of wacko religious fundamentalism. Tim P. is just not going to be radical enough, so he’ll be painted as a “closet liberal”.
There is going to a gauntlet of purity tests. Ultimately the 20% base is going to be split into several sects that hate each other as much as the Democrats. There is no way the unholy alliance of evangelicals and mormons holds.
It will be a cakewalk for Obama. He’ll essentially be running unopposed.
jibeaux
@geg6:
I’ve just read the thing, and I think it is pretty true to the vibe I get, which is essentially just conspiracy theorist. Race is probably a factor, but if we had a white president or Obama is white, I don’t think it would fundamentally change the fact that a significant minority of people are flat-out paranoid, conspiracy-believing people who are dumber than a box of rocks – they’d still hate him. The racism just adds another flavor.
David
@Brick Oven Bill: The stupid burns.
We all evolved in the absence of gunpowder. But by all means, keep trying.
georgia pig
I think the racism’s there, but it’s not particularly directed at Obama and it’s just overshadowed by the nativism/tribalism. I think that it’s hard for many on the right to look at Obama as “just another n*****” because he’s too exotic and “clean and articulate.” It’s much easier to make him into some sort of Manchurian boogeyman created by Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky. In other words, it’s red-baiting, not racism. It’s all a grand conspiracy to take the working man’s money and give it to a bunch of commissars and shiftless folks that elect them, and the latter is where the racism comes in. Outside of that context, a lot of these folks would be fine with the Obamas if they moved into their neighborhood and kept their politics to themselves.
From time to time on lefty sites I see blanket statements about “crackers” and “rednecks.” While I’m sure there are plenty of crackers and rednecks among the teabaggers, I’ve been struck by the generally non-cracker quality of the teabaggers. That tape of Lindsey Graham in SC was genuinely weird, because the guys heckling him sounded more like they were from South Jersey than Columbia. A lot of these guys sporting rebel flags and other Dixie paraphernalia have about as tenuous a connection to Robert E. Lee as my dog. I wonder how much self-selection has gone on in the past several years to concentrate nativist types in the south, because the culture here is attractive to nativists. There are a hell of a lot of retirees in SC, GA, AL, and a lot of folks directly or indirectly connected to military bases, both groups where you expect a lot of nativist tendencies. I have a place down by Jacksonville, and there is heavy concentration of these types down there, and they’re, for the most part, connected to the bases, which are the drivers of the economy in a lot of those places (the ultimate irony, DoD Socia 1sm). The point being, don’t assume the racial motivations are same as the anti-civil rights types of the 50’s and 60’s.
matoko_chan
mebbe……Huckabee/Palin ?
Jack
@Savage Henry:
I think that all depends on coverage. A lot of the vicious bloodletting and infighting in 2000 never saw the light of mediated day.
I was in the Dole camp (before I outgrew Randite stupidity) during the run up to the NH primary, and the stuff coming out of the Bush machine (and it was a formidable beast, that) for circulation in living room events was despicable, especially aimed at McCain, Dole and Forbes.
Reporters certainly knew about. Regional and national ones, too. But, it wasn’t part of the narrative they wanted to use, so it was ignored.
Campaigns are more porous now, and more mercenary (thanks in part to Bush), but the national press still retains undue influence over those same narratives.
stacie
I suspect that we’re seeing the full flowering of what used to be called “The Religious Right” come into its own as a purely political bloc.
As far as I know, the Christian Coalition declared bankruptcy or something and whatever’s left of it isn’t relevant. Add the irrelevance of religious leaders like Robertson and Dobson, revealed by the failure during the Bush years to ban abortion or gay marriage or the dozen other social issues that motivate these folks. Or to prevent McCain from being nominated last year. Ouch.
And the grievances are the same — it’s all culture war all the time. I grew up in Alabama and live next door in Georgia now, and I remember in the early 2000s when Judge Roy Moore over there moved his granite monument to the ten commandments into the Alabama Supreme Court building lobby. He lost his job, but eventually ran for governor.
It was one of those make or break moments in politics, where (what was then) the Religious Right decided it had become mainstream enough to take a governor’s mansion in a relentlessly red state. Instead, Moore was defeated in the primary. Ouch.
Part of me feels like the whole Teabagger phenomenon shouldn’t be so surprising to us. This sliver of Americana has been pestering the body politic for a long time with its fundamentalism, and now that Ron Paul has given them some wacky rallying cries (End the Fed!) and Glenn Beck has illuminated the numerous communist conspiracies out there, in the absence of strong religious leadership, they think they have a political philosophy.
This goes back a really long time. Scopes Monkey Trial long time. Farther, even. The great land rushes in the 19th century as the frontier moved farther and farther out that left speculators rich and farmers poor. This sense of grievance is as old as America itself. Same people, same regions even.
So far, they’ve been sufficiently anti-modernist and their goals so contrary to Americans’ general notion of “Leave me alone” (abortion should be my decision, not Washington’s / who I love is my business, not Washington’s) that their agenda is never implemented. The world keeps spinning. Change keeps happening.
And their grievance builds…. A fundamentalist by any other name is still just that. Teabagger, Christian Conservative, Religious Right, whatever. Same people. Same issues. Same unwillingness to compromise to achieve their goals, so it’s just the same failure, over and over again, in a loop as long as their own distorted reading of history.
tigrismus
the GQR people say that the hostility towards Obama seems much more ideological and much less personal than with Clinton
To what part of his ideology are they hostile? The one that wants to incrementally stimulate the economy and hopefully eventually get folks back to work, but not actually do anything crazy like re-regulate banking, cram-down mortgages, cap bonuses, etc? Fix health care but only if everybody can agree on a compromise that doesn’t pinch anyone’s profits? Yeah, real blood-boilers to the righties those are.
different church-lady
@ruemara:
The Venn diagram on racism would be very interesting: there’d be a big circle marked ‘hate’ and another big circle marked ‘ignorance’ and another huge circle marked ‘fear’ and they’d all have a large area of overlap that was marked ‘racism’. One could then deny racist feelings merely by concentrating on any one of the circles and ignoring the overlap.
My theory on racism is that we’ve got the cart and the horse backwards: we think that when someone is racist it is because someone’s ‘otherness’ creates a sense of fear an hatred. I think it’s the other way around: the fear and hatred already exist in the person, and they find an outlet for those emotions by fixating on the ‘otherness’.
different church-lady
@Brick Oven Bill:
Well, that certainly does explain a lot…
David
@matoko_chan: Also known as socially desirable response bias.
If they asked straight out if they were racists (which I cannot tell from the document provided), then the researchers almost certainly induced social desirability. The conclusions almost based on those biased results are almost certainly wrong, if so.
valdivia
yes the race question seems to me to be formulated in a way that elicits a false response.
The main point of the whole thing is not the race answer but that these people have constructed a reality that does not exist anywhere but their minds. The Obama they are opposing is pure projection.
I am using Chrome now anyway to use Cleek’s BOB pie filter with this?
Jack
@stacie:
It’s probably worse than ever, given the money coming from Theonomists/Dominionists such as Anschutz (think about all the money he gets from movie patrons as well as Kings, Galaxy and Lakers fans), billionaire anarcho-capitalists such as the Koch brothers, et cetera.
Janet Strange
@anonevent: I think that’s kind of the point – it’s right out of the “we’re not racists!” (we’re just a persecuted minority of real Americans who see the truth! thanks to Fox!) part of the report.
Preemptive not-racism – have a Black man articulate their alternative reality.
different church-lady
@jibeaux: You’re getting at the right thing, but there’s room for both paranoia andracism within the same person or set of people. If one focuses on the fear — termed “paranoia” if your critical of them, termed “outrage” if your supportive — then you can conveniently ignore the racism component. “I hate him because he’s black AND he makes me afraid. I’m just not going to mention the first part.”
aimai
Church Lady @ 79
I love the venn diagram image hate/ignorance/fear with racism at the overlap. But I’d like to add that people move in and out of the venn diagram, like cattle between fields during the day. I think one thing that the media does fairly consistently is to falsley label people “racists” or “not racists” as though the totality of a person’s viewpoint on everything has to be out and out racist (where racist means nutty and mean too) before you can call actions or speech based on racism “racist.” But the fact is that people are only more or less race conscious and prejudiced depending on circumstances. Not only will they not cop to their real feelings under many circumstances (Iike being polled) but they don’t have real feelings, exactly. They have situational feelings and explanations for things. So black people on their side get good feelings (Alan Keyes, Colin Powell sometimes, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell), and white people on the other side can be “blacked” (Clinton) when race is the language of anger and fear.
aimai
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Hunter Gathers:
The thing which bothers me about this scenario is that, Richard Nixon’s foreign policy chops aside, the thing which brought the GOP back from the brink after 1964 was not so much that they suddenly discovered that extremism in defense of liberty was actually a vice, but rather than the Democratic coalition was ripped apart over Vietnam and Civil Rights. By the time Reagan was elected the GOP was actually much more conservative than in Goldwater’s day.
If that scenario repeats itself again, it isn’t going to be nice. Imagine a GOP in which Palin is mildly left of center. Then imagine them taking power, because the Dems have royally fncked up. Good times, heh indeedy.
Svensker
@Janet Strange:
They call Obama a “cipher” and then detail all the incredible booga booga scary horrible communist terrorist fascist things he is doing. That’s a very busy and powerful cipher.
James
@ericblair:
Well, if you read the the, Vega makes the point that:
(blockquote)
In contrast, two profoundly different stereotypes of Obama were overwhelmingly widespread — indeed almost universally shared — among the demonstrators.
a. Obama as a modern Hitler or Stalin – a would-be dictator seeking to impose totalitarianism on America. …
b. Obama as a sinister, duplicitous, devious and charismatic demagogue – a master manipulator who only rules by virtue of brainwashing and lies. ….
The central psychological fact about these two images is that they are simply not tapping into the basic and deeply embedded cognitive stereotypes that underlie anti-Black racism. If anything, they are actually much closer to the “yellow peril” stereotypes of the 1930’s — devious and sinister Asian villains portrayed in movie characters like Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless – rather than any common American stereotypes of African-Americans.
(end blockquote)
Vega was talking about the “tea parties” and how, while there WAS obviously some traditional racism, that we are seeing a broader fear and phenomenon here. It’s a good, insightful piece, and I recommend it.
Once again:
Democratic Strategist
Ambergris
Oh well, the Southerners loved the New Deal and big government as long as it didn’t tackle the race issue. They had no problem supporting the big Bush government because it was there to fight muslims. Racism is a part of the ideology – it is the subconscious base of today’s conservatism. Reagan got the nomination only after he had started his campaign in the South. In 1968 and 1976, southerners blocked his way (Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms), so he joined them – all under the radar. This was the alliance between big business and old dixie.
There is something else though – the feeling that today’s world is moving too fast. All the talk about FEMA camps and indoctrination in the schools is about the loss of control, especially parental control. That’s not ideological either, it’s just a panicky feeling of powerlessness.
Jack
@James:
Fascinating.
anonevent
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yep, and after all of the blog articles and what-not with Democrats yelling at each other over DOMA and DODT, I wouldn’t put it past us.
Jack
@Ambergris:
I think, to echo what was written earlier, that “nativism” is the better term. There are certainly racial nativists, but the entire movement is not inherently racist.
aimai
Ahah! My point up above is proved by this lovely, lovely, quote from the guy who refused to marry the interracial couples in LA:
At this rate “racism” like “cannibalism” is something that is always practiced by someone else just down the river from the speaker. Regardless of whether he’s gnawing on a human thighbone at the time of the interview.
aimai
stacie
@different church-lady:
Don’t forget though, they also see Sarah Palin as being intolerably, publicly victimized by the media and political establishments, which makes her a sort of archetypal queen for their movement.
This strikes me as very powerful, very primal stuff that’s playing out in public with these folks. It won’t win them elections, but it’s fascinating as hell.
matoko_chan
stacie, WECs were 50% of the GOP in 2008 exit polling.
I estimate them at over 75% currently….people leaving the GOP to become independents are non-WEC resulting in WEC concentration effect.
Since WECs are overrepresented as almost the totality of the GOP base, they are able to dictate platform as evangelical doctrine.
Homophobes (anti-SSM), pro-life and creationists are all that can run.
The White Evangelical Christian Republican Party
aimai
And Jack, how can you say that an American “nativist” movement isn’t inherently racist? I mean, white people in this country are, definitionally, immigrant and the other contemporary immigrant groups with them, like Blacks or the Chinese, are never included in any “nativist” imagery or history. There’s no way of talking about american nativism and its buddy jingoism without talking about racism.
aimai
Tim P.
It seems to me that race and Obama’s supposed religion are used more as *evidence* for his sinister plans to turn America into a totalitarian state rather than something to hate intrinsically. Of course, there’s a bit of a contradiction in claiming that Obama is a black nationalist Christian-Muslim- atheist communist, but that’s just par for the course these days.
Tony J
Once they – really – realise this, as opposed to knowing it’s true but Tinkerbelling like mad anyway, and with the GOP Primary debates mainlining Obamahate in ever increasing doses to their adrenaline glands…
Let’s just say that I expect to ignore a lot of WaPo op-ed pieces around then all uniformly demanding that Obama refuse to stand again because his candidature has become “so polarising that it poses a real and present danger to the continuance of our nation’s traditionally peaceful democratic processes“, likely entitled “Obama has done enough“, “Simmering anger reflects need for change in Democrat field” and “You’re so vain, I bet you think this election is about you“
Svensker
Re the racism thing, I think there is some some (you should hear my hub’s Georgia uncle, ugh, real old school lynching type stuff), but I also think with some people it’s just a handle to hang their hatred on. I.e., if it were Hillary, they’d be doing the whole lesbian killer thing, as someone mentioned upthread.
It’s purely anecdotal, but I think of my brother who is a fundie and a dittohead and pretty much absolutely insane when it comes to politics and who is convinced Obama is the terrorist godless Commie menace anti-Christ. But I also know that my brother adopted an abused black child and has raised her and loved her as his own. I can’t call him a racist. I can call him a xenophobe who sees Obama as an exotic and dangerous Other, whose blackness just adds to the Otherness.
People are complicated, even nutty wingers.
Alan
@aimai: And no doubt he ignores that chip on their shoulder just like Rush limbaugh. Well, unless it’s important to point it out–like with respect to Obama.
Svensker
@aimai:
What you said, much better than I did.
Jack
@aimai:
Because the definition of “native” is no longer exclusively racial. It’s now predominantly cultural.
If you have the stomach, take a month long foray into Sean Hannity’s forum (I spent six years arguing away my retirement, there).
There are the old school racists – no doubt, and they almost exclusively post from Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
But, by and large, they are simply dwarfed by the number of movement conservatives who cannot understand why black people aren’t conservatives, not why they cannot be more like white people.
The old terms definitely persists, as I commented above – but these are not people who define themselves by the race of their opponents.
They define themselves, and their Others, by what they believe.
Publicly conservative black people are not excluded, so long as the break the cultural bread.
Part of understanding this, perhaps, comes from understanding that the unifying undercurrent developed in suburban and ex urban mega churches which are, for all their other many faults, very post racial (see Ohio’s Jesus Christ Superstar, Rod Parsley and his very public support for Blackwell).
Svensker
@Jack:
Ding ding ding. That is my experience with my winger/fundie family.
geg6
@aimai:
I couldn’t agree with you more, amai. And I really don’t understand why people, even people here, have so much trouble accepting the truth of that.
jibeaux
@different church-lady:
Well, yes, it’s certainly true that there is room for both paranoia and racism. But the attitude these people embody is very afraid of people who are Other, and there are other ways to be Other besides race. Obama’s got kind of that urbane, yuppie, intellectual coolness going on, too. His vibe is 180 degrees opposite from the Quitta from Wasilla. So I’m just never very certain about that. I mean, they have complete derangement about entire occupations and regions of the country — Hollywood, professors, Northeasterners, left coasters, New Yorkers, etc., anybody who represents a culture that isn’t gun-totin’ and Bible beltin’ is foreign and to be mistrusted, so for me it can be hard to tell. Now, sometimes, they bring a sign or say things that make it easy, but not always.
aimai
Jack,
Those people aren’t “nativists”–nativism has a real meaning and when its applied to political groups it exists in contradistinction to some notion of “immigrants” and “foreigners.” Historically the reaction against immigrants and foreigners has been raced–and the groups that were most politically active qua nativist did not include non whites *even if they were native.*
Your megachurch groups aren’t “nativist” but they might be “conservative” or “jingoist” or “america firsters” or “dominionists” or lots of other things. I don’t doubt they are “post racial”–although promise keepers foundered on that rock when it tried to push beyond “I’m ok with the middle class black guy who is already in the pew next to me” to “let’s have a real discussion of racism in this country and apologize for it.” I mean, I’m not really surprised that the the mega church people of the world aren’t out and out racists and will worship with black people as long as those black people dress/look/vote white. As extremely religious and often fundamentalist communities African americans are a natural ally of conservative evangelical whites and they certainly tried to recruit them for local anti gay campaigns.
What I see in the white evangelical/republican attitude towards religious blacks is a frustrated sense that “those people” are the ones putting race ahead of religion. They should be voting with conservatives on conservative social issues and also on fiscal policy but they don’t. They are religious traitors for voting with the godless democrats–and they are probably doing it because of misplaced racial loyalty.
But this is only to say that the right wing can’t see the mote in its own eye and believes that when blacks vote democratic/Obama they are voting their racial identity. But when whites vote conservative they are voting their issues.
aimai
Comrade Dread
Yeah, but the aftermath won’t be pretty with millions of people screeching that St. Sarah was cheated out of the election by the sinister forces of ACORN, UNIONS, SOROS!!!!!
To which the media will probably speculate on just how voter fraud could have occurred and changed the election (despite evidence to the contrary) because it would irresponsible not to ask questions.
Anne Laurie
@kay:
I agree. The Media Village Idiots have trained themselves to think of ‘true believers’ as cute little sideshow exhibits, where evangelical celebrations and the latest zoo acquisitions are equally valuable space-fillers between the “real” news stories.
In the modern Republican Golden Triangle, Huckabee represents the Talibangelicals and Romney represents the Robber Barons. If either of them can find a way to co-opt the fReichtards, they’d be unbeatable within the GOP, although the ensuing frankencandidacy would probably scare the reality-based community into nightmares. More probably, in my opinion, Romney’s bidniz supporters will buy Sarah Palin’s negotiable affections in an attempt to siphon off Huckabee supporters, and the neocons of the 101st Chairborne will have to decide whether the Rapture-Ready or the Global-Parasite ideologue is more likely to ‘keep Amurka safe’ by trying to blow up all the brown-people countries.
geg6
@Jack:
Oh, well then. I guess all the wingnuts around here screaming “he’s a dirty ni**er” every time I canvassed last fall were figments of my imagination.
(Of course, there WAS that one guy in Westmoreland County who, when his wife answered the door and yelled into the living room to find out who they were voting for, said, “Tell her we’re voting for the ni**er.”)
stacie
@Comrade Dread:
I read that sentence as ending with, “ACORNS, UNICORNS, SOROS!!” and when I blinked and read what you’d actually written, I thought mine was probably more accurate.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: I have noticed that a significant number of commenters here are former conservatives. I wonder how many were here when JC was on the right and came with him and how many have found a blog home with other apostates.
Anyway, sometimes I wonder about things.
Anne Laurie
@Janet Strange:
Chris Muir (the cartoonist) can’t be a racist — he has a Black sockpuppet!
That’s a joke in our world, but Muir has actually used the ‘one of my best characters is Black’ defense, unironically.
Midnight Marauder
@Anne Laurie:
Either way you slice it, 2012 will be like Lord of The Flies come to life for the Republican party. There are just too many factions competing to fill the gaping void of leadership/authority/control that currently exists, and none of them can really create a long enough lasting peace to actually accomplish any of their goals. But I totally agree with the theory that Hucakbee is the one to watch as the primary season gets closer and closer. Palin may generate the headlines and buzz, but there’s a reason Huckabee hung around so long during last year’s primary against McCain.
And that support is only going to increase as the march to Sarahgeddon continues.
Scott Rock
The study reports that conservatives are afraid of being labeled racists, and–surprise–they then don’t say racist things to the interviewers. Can you see a problem with that methodology? Of course conservatives aren’t going to spout racist invective to an anonymous interviewer when the only source they trust is FOX NEWS.
And the family values bullshit? Please. That’s the equivalent of the big miscegenation mess in Louisiana: “I’m fine with black people, i have ‘piles’ of black friends, i just don’t think they should be allowed to marry whites. Or run my country.”
Think of the children.
Jack
@aimai:
I am suggesting to you that the terms have changed because the conditions have changed. One is no longer a “native” because of ancestry, but because of cultural and religious fealty.
Savage Henry
Sully linked to this:
It perfectly speaks to this thread. The GOP nutters say its not that we’re racist and hate minorities, is that they are racist and they hate us! We need to defend ourselves!
Limbaugh has been conjuring up this phony victimhood for the last 20-some years. For all the dittoheads it has become dogma. And seeing that they never, ever leave the echo chamber they will never realize that it is bullshit. They will go on believing that someone who just signed a $200 million contract is a helpless victim.
Scott Rock
The study reports that conservatives are afraid of being labeled racists, and–surprise–they then don’t say racist things to the interviewers. Can you see a problem with that methodology? Of course conservatives aren’t going to spout racist invective to an anonymous interviewer when the only source they trust is FOX NEWS.
And the family values crap? Please. That’s the equivalent of the big miscegenation mess in Louisiana: “I’m fine with black people, i have ‘piles’ of black friends, i just don’t think they should be allowed to marry whites. Or run my country.”
Think of the children.
Jack
@geg6:
What Jack did not type: “None of the movement wingnuts are racists. Nope, not one. It’s only about politics.”
Corner Stone
@Alan: Enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing.
Scott Rock
The study reports that conservatives are afraid of being labeled racists, and–surprise–they then don’t say racist things to the interviewers. Can you see a problem with that methodology? Of course conservatives aren’t going to spout racist invective to an anonymous interviewer when the only source they trust is FOX NEWS.
And the praise of Obama’s family values? Please. That’s the equivalent of the big miscegenation mess in Louisiana: “I’m fine with black people, i have ‘piles’ of black friends, i just don’t think they should be allowed to marry whites. Or run my country.”
Think of the children.
Corner Stone
@David: Also more widely known as the “Halo Effect” when sex surveys are done.
kay
@Anne Laurie:
Absolutely, but Romney has that pesky minority religion. It’s not a problem for his financial backers (of course) and it wasn’t a problem for blue state voters, but that’s what interests me: it’s a problem for evangelical Christians.
Huckabee thinks evangelical voters are his. Add Glenn Beck and it gets interesting. What if Beck/Romney claim (rightly) religious discrimination?
I don’t think Sarah Palin give’s a rat’s ass who votes for her, as long as someone does. I think she probably fell in with Republicans because she happened to land in Alaska. She’s mean, dumb and ambitious, but if she’s an ” ideological conservative”…well, she’s not. She’d better make friends with Huckabee. He’s a true believer. He’ll run all over her.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d wager a certain percentage are really more “authoritarian followers” than conservatives, and just followed JC’s lead without really batting an eye about it.
Demo Woman
@Corner Stone: YaThink! lol
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: That would explain
alotsomethingmumble, mumble…stickler
The thing that worries me about the nutcase fringe, is how large and reality-resistant it is. Oh, and well-armed. It only takes a few of them to do something pointless, futile, and violent. Not unlike the 1960s, if you recall.
I’m afraid of the unpleasantness that unhinged rhetoric can unleash. Glenn Beck has already influenced at least one nutcase gun spree. How many more are waiting in the wings?
aimai
Jack,
I don’t see any evidence that the “terms have changed” –or that they need to. There certainly is plenty of evidence that the group evangelicals/megachurch believers/conservative christians are identical with the group “all white racists” but what that has to do with nativism or some notion that if everybody was just a plain gosh darned amurikan without all that ugly identity politics stuff that blacks and women keep dragging into it we’d be a better country. I mean, I’m not doubting that among the megachurches with their long history of missonizing africa race, mere race, is not the bugaboo it is for your deep south american racist. But that isn’t to say that this is nativism. Its not. Sarah Palin not only co-worships with a black african dude she believes he can excorcise people. That isn’t to say that she and her buddies can’t also be racist against american blacks in urban locales, and through the damn jews in for good measure when they are in New York *at the same time* that the armageddon wing of her own party/religious cult believes its good to be nice to the jews in Israel. This shit is complicated. A recognition that prejudices and hatreds are extremely situational would help.
aimai
kay
Compare and contrast
Former Bush official is sentenced:
“Safavian and his wife, Jennifer, begged Friedman for leniency during a hearing Friday in the District’s federal court, saying their family had suffered enough without having to endure a prison sentence. They are bankrupt, Safavian will lose his law license and he will be barred from ever contracting with the government, they said.
Jennifer Safavian said she was pregnant with their second child. They said they were worried about how their 6-year-old daughter would cope if her father was sent to prison. Safavian conceded that he had made mistakes and used poor judgment but said that he did not think he had broken any laws. “I beg you to take into account how what I have to go through will impact my family,” he told the judge. The judge said he would allow Safavian to wait until after his child is born to enter prison. ”
And, here we have the Other American:
“Nelson was a 29-year-old non-violent offender who was six months pregnant with her second child when she was incarcerated by the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADOC) in June 2003. Three months later, after going into labor, she was taken to a local hospital where correctional officers shackled her legs to opposite sides of the bed. Nelson remained shackled to the bed for several hours of labor until she was finally taken to the delivery room.
The shackles caused Nelson cramps and intense pain, as she could not adjust her position during contractions. She was unshackled during delivery, but was immediately re-shackled after the birth of her son. After childbirth, the use of shackles caused her to soil the sheets of her bed because she could not be unshackled quickly enough to get to a bathroom.”
eyelessgame
It’s hard to know what to add to all this fun – except that I think that the people who say it’s cultural seem to have their finger on it. To them there’s nothing wrong with a black person if he’s part of Our Team. As the Texas crowd shouted to an official during a football game back in the early days of college integration, “Get that ni**er off our colored boy!”
I am still fascinated by the problem for the GOP that seems just as important for 2012 as it did for 2008: each of their intrinsically incompatible factions has their own candidate and — more to the point — cannot stand the other candidates. What’s a little different is that there are multiple probable candidates for the religious right, and not so many for the others — there’s Romney and Pawlenty, and possibly R*n Pa*l, each representing a different constituency, but Huck and Palin and Jindal are all Christian-centric characters.
But there’s no St. Ron in the bunch to make them paper over their differences like he did. And without that — without Him — they just aren’t going to win elections.
Huck has potential. He could do as much damage as Ron and MoRon did. The others won’t win a general election (unless it gets screwed up badly by Obama’s team, and I have confidence in them).
So perhaps Caribou Barbie will save the world after all, if she denies Huckabee the nomination…
sparky
after reading that memo, seems to me that people are missing the main thrust of it: that this core of people in the party are true believers in the way that evangelicals might be labeled true believers. in this regard, the most interesting finding is the Palin popularity, which makes sense because at the end of the day, this is not a coherent political ideology but a quasi-religious attachment. they are the persecuted true believers the same way those folks who first followed that guy with the beard were. here we see the fruit of the GOP’s vote efforts, and it is poison: by ginning up a politics that could be mistaken for a religion, they short-circuited the third rail of american politics (religion) and injected a fundamentalist poison into the body politic. the only similar conflation i can think of at the moment is states’ rights and slavery, and we know how that ended.
two other, minor points:
1. i’d agree with those people suggesting something other than racism is ALSO at work here. the GOP has been selling scary people ever since WWII (recall that it took the overreach of calling Eisenhower a closet commie to cool things down). there’s just no way that kind of thinking can be turned off quickly, even if someone wanted to do so.
2. like cranky lefty types like me, they do recognize that something is seriously awry with the “American dream”. they just think the remedy is to go backwards rather than forwards. and yes, that “just” covers a lot of ground. perhaps that’s the place to start from–rather than advocate out of the box, agree on the problem, if not the underlying reason(s) for it.
Maude
@kay: Don’t you think that Palin would put her hand on Huck’s thigh and look into his eyes? He’d be all over her amirite?
Anne Laurie
@kay:
If I thought Huckabee and Palin could actually compromise enough to run on the same ticket, I’d be more scared. But they’ve both got giant egos, and I can’t see either one “settling” for the bottom half of the ticket. There’s a PhD thesis waiting to be written about the difference between Huckabee’s old-school Old-Testament fundamentalism (“God is Great, because He has put straight white male Americans like ME at the top of His pyramid”) and Palin’s shiny modern Pauline brand (“God wants ME, personally, to be at the top of the pyramid, and the proof is that He never stops providing ME with new gifts and opportunities.”) Palin, however, is way more palatable to the GOP Bidniz Barons, because her brand of Prosperity Gospel permits the posting of a giant neon-illuminated FOR SALE sign right on the front lawn of her candidacy, while Huckabee’s supporters are still constrained by old-fashioned word-of-mouth-amongst-the-right-people salesmanship.
aimai
This, this this:
t
There’s no way Palin will take second billing a second time. No way in hell. And no way Huck will take second billing to a woman. That wouldn’t sit right with either of their constituencies.
aimai
kay
@Anne Laurie:
I am weirdly bored by Palin. I never got involved in Bush, personally, either. I was interested in Cheney. Appalled, but interested.
I think you’re right about “Palin as cover” though, for bidness people. And neoconservatives. That’s why Bill Kristol likes her.
James
To be clear, I don’t think anyone is trying to say that there is NO anti-Black racism here. Clearly, it is part of this, and for some people it is ALL about anti-Black racism. Vega is making the point that this movement is broader than anti-Black racism, and he coins the term “cultural nativism” to encompass the anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-Muslim elements that are at play as well. No one is denying that there are anti-Black racists in the movement.
He is also making the point that as we fail to fully understand all of the elements of this pathology, people will rise up to defend people on the basis that they are “not racist.”
Legalize
Wait until Obama begins the push for immigration reform.
Anne Laurie
@stickler:
“Futile”? Hey, shooting those mouthy Micks and that uppity preacher gave us Richard Nixon, whose tragically abbreviated tenure nutured the
festering nightmaresbright lights of St. Ronnie’s apotheosis and the neoconservatives that have done so much to restore America’s global greatness!It’s not the half-crazed, powerless Lone Gunmen we have to worry about (that’s the job of the Secret Service) — it’s the prosperous and well-connected social networks looking for a sacrificial Lee Harvey Oswald or John Hinckley they can use.
Tony J
This.
If the study is right and someone like Palin really does take the nomination, the Republican base is odds on to throw up some wannabe martyr with a sniper rifle who thinks he’s got no other choice if he wants to alter the course of human events.
And that’s frightening, because as many times as I’ve tried to sign this off without coming across as concern troll of the worst kind, I seriously can’t see 2012 coming around without some kind of extreme political violence from the rejectionists on the Right.
Jack
@aimai:
Of course the terms and conditions have changed – the conservative movement openly embraces Asian (Malkin), Hispanic (Chavez), Black (Blackwell), Indian (Jindal) and female (Hutchinson) leaders and candidates, so long as they are cultural natives.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@James:
It is a great article, and jives with a lot of what I have seen in my conservative family.
Makewi
People who assume democrat=liberal, or even nonwhite=liberal seem to have a harder time understanding this sort of thing. It’s part of the ideological blinder that assumes we (democrat/liberal/progressive) are all that is good and they (republican/conservative) are all that is bad and wrong with the world.
You can see a lot of that going on in the comments here.
John Dillinger
I can’t see Palin running for President, that is almost an 18-month commitment just to get the nomination. Too much work. But the others will have to pander to the teabaggers. And with no Democratic nomination contest, the Republicans will have the stage to themselves. It will be quite the spectable. I am hoping for 3 debates a week starting the day after the mid-terms.
ericblair
@eyelessgame: To them there’s nothing wrong with a black person if he’s part of Our Team.
Well, yeah. Tokenism: it’s what’s for dinner! As long as they agree with you in everything and don’t ask for anything, no problem. Of course, if there’s more than one of them, it’s a mob.
I do agree that there is a difference between accepting a person who is just like you except for melanin content, and accepting someone who is different than you culturally. Since we don’t have the luxury of having our memories zapped and being thrown on a tropical island, people are going to have to deal with cultural differences for several generations at least.
ericblair
@Makewi: It’s part of the ideological blinder that assumes we (democrat/liberal/progressive) are all that is good and they (republican/conservative) are all that is bad and wrong with the world.
Sure, ‘cuz simplistic us-and-them generalizations are what democrat/liberal/progressives are known for. Yup.
Makewi
@ericblair:
Too funny.
Seonachan
His children are what, 10 and 8? Nope, no racism there at all. Who was the right-wing blogger who posted the anecdote a few years ago about wanting to shake the hand of a black man in a restaurant because he had an intact and well behaved family?
Makewi
@Seonachan:
You must be talking about Joe Biden. But I don’t think he’s a conservative.
aimai
James,
I’ll read the vega article and I don’t disagree once you add the extra but very important phrase “cultural nativism.” The point about “nativism” is that it was always fictitious and denied the fact that the “native” was, in fact, an immigrant and that other “natives” like, say, indians, were both “native” and exotic and different in cultural values from the “new natives.”
So its not surprising to see the emergence of this new “cultural nativism” which contains a kind of deliberate self amnesia about, say, race, class and history in order to construct itself as peculiarly “non racist” against the background of its own racist history. The Malkins et al serve no particularly striking function–they are tokens and they exist at the bidding and with the acceptance of a master/majority only so long as they accept their subordinate role as legitimizers of the majorities anti-racist cred. That’s why they are in there. That’s why they are often spokesmen for a largely all white crowd. They have always served that function for the entire Republican party since Nixon. There’s nothing new there. YOu have only to pan across the actual crowds or look at the real demographic breakdown to see that the veneer of acceptance goes skin deep.
I admit that for some portion of this group they are still scratching their heads about the weird response of “those” hispanics who look at their anti immigrant stance and turn against the Republican party. Its true that they are not necessarily racist in the narrow sense like “dislikes people with spanish surnames and mexican accents” and they can’t see why “hispanic voters” don’t recognize that. The racist part comes in the assumption that what goes around for the imaginary illegal alien threat doesn’t come around on people with hispanic surnames, and family members accross the border, who have in fact been living here for 400 years or so. In other words, their very imaginary color blindness affects their understanding of how their own policies work in the real world. Malkin’s “defense of internment” of *other* brown people at the same time that the entire right wing goes shrieking in hysterics for fear of FEMA camps is a case in point. These people are incapable of grasping *principle* and *precedent* and they can’t figure out why blacks, jews, women do, and act accordingly.
aimai
kay
@Seonachan:
I disagree with that. It was the big mistake of white pundits. I was embarrassed for them, they got it so wrong.
Remember the meme that women hated Michelle Obama because she was an America-hating radical?
Then she actually was first lady and her approval was really high?
I knew non-politically attuned women would be comfortable with her. She’s the absolute stereotype of “good modern mother”. I don’t think she’s fake, and I’m not knocking it. It’s what she is. Upper middle class former professional striver-mom. The same is true of Obama as father and husband.
I think the conservative approval of the Obama family life is probably legit.
burnspbesq
@Brick Oven Bill:
You have a problem with that? I think it would be GREAT if we could have a sane center-right party made up of former Blue Dog Democrats and the rational conservatives who have been run out of the Republican Party. Then the
National FrontRepublican Party can fade away into insignificance.Jack
@burnspbesq:
I am wary of the hubris of any presumptions about social or cultural progress – or, that one group or faction will fade into insignificance simply because they are currently out of vogue.
Demographics are fate, but that does not mean that ideology will remain consistent, within demographic population samples.
Populist fervor is legitimate, even if it’s being astroturfed “from above.” Those concerns about “our America,” and losing the house, and der soshulusm, and moral values are real.
Actual persons actually experience them, and sincerely, whether or not they have valid models or good data.
And we are major collapse of the commercial real estate market away from enduring social crisis, the sort that can’t be (temporarily) band-aided by giving away the Commons to culprit banks.
If that occurs, and the ramifications follow as expected, more people will be angry and afraid. Not less.
Enter our adversaries, stage right…
Makewi
The word is he’s super cool to his secret service agents, which is a big plus.
aimai
I think I’m the last person posting on this thread and I shouldr eally take it over to NMMNB but I have something I want to say about the novel idea of “cultural nativism.”
Racism has always co-existed very uneasily with the fact that other races are, or could be, though to be just like us–with all our rights, morals, religion, etc… And the place that that emerges originally is around the question of “souls”–did non white people have souls? Las Casas argued, IIRC correctly, that they did. Other people weren’t so sure. White Southernors originally prevented their slaves from adopting christianity in order to prevent them from laying claim to full humanity and moral equality with their masters. AFter a while christianity was permitted, and even encouraged, with an emphasis (from the white side of things) on old testament notions of authority and leadership.
But *those* notions of hierarchy and subordination co-existed uneasily with other cultural tropes like the “self made man” and “every man can rise” and the free market–when african americans were thrown on to the “free market” and industrialization and wage labor became the main form of market oppression American Elites threw themselves fully behind an ideology of libertarian freedom in which every man/woman was responsible for his/her own fate economically. Slavery and, of course, sexism as well as class oppression were eliminated from the discussion. You ended up in society where your talents placed you, not your race or sex or your parent’s class position.
The “cultural nativism” that James/Vega is describing seems to me to be the heir to this moral conundrum–how to square the circle of a society that has poor, non religious, non white people with a society which ideally lets each person rise according to their own merit? The evangelicals/cultural nativists impose a model in which everyone can volunteer to be a “real american” if they only choose hard enough. And everyone else is either born that way, or viciously chooses not to choose right.
I sense that the kind of cultural nativism that James is talking about is most likely to be found in American post racial churches because religious affiliation and the acceptance of non-whites as true moral equals happened there, and was fought over there, first. I also see the whole discussion as paralleling theories of gayness. There’s a reason that the scientific argument that people are simply born with their sexual orientation is so terrifying to the anti gay set. If gay’s can’t choose to join the community then the community is, when it rejects them, homophobic. Similarly, if blacks and women can’t/don’t choose to join the conservatives because they are born that way the conservative movement has to re-examine itself. If blacks and women are *refusing* because they don’t accept the doctrine they can easily be consigned to the equivalent of hell/left outside the magic circle.
In other other words I guess I think the notion that “anyone can belong” to the new american cultural nativist party is sort of a misbegotten fantasy born out of the unholy love affair between the theocons and the peasant slave/libertarian philosophies of the two wings of the republican party. Its where conservativism gets its modern legitimacy. But its not real.
Well, its complicated. Must go retrieve challah from oven.
aimai
General Winfield Stuck
There was only one group of people that regularly commented here, after Cole left the wingnuts. That was people who hated George Bush and wingnuts with a passion, and simply wanted to keep republicans out of office and democrats in. The standard of which dems was very low, and nuance for policy was barely relevant. Just so long as they weren’t GOP. That was the over riding and only, though unwritten, rule, if there was one. Who was leading who or following who was irrelevant. Wingnuts were the only enemy and those who despised them were the BJ commentariat. plus the wingnut trolls who came around to take a pound of flesh from the traitor.
Then comes the election 08, and the bitter primary and the Hillbot was born, and ever since, the dead ender PUMA species or Hillz warrior was born, and a new kind of troll emerged and remains with us. Dems with an axe to grind as they say. Not people with legitimate concerns about how the current dem presnit is doing things. But who hang around for any opportunity to bash Obama for his sin of beating their queen. They don’t care about keeping a dem presnit, or even a dem majority in congress. They wants payback. And I’m talking about you Corner Stone, one of the nastiest of Hillbots during the campaign.
And if Hillary Clinton had won the primary instead of Obama, we would have supported her for the same reasons I stated above. But that didn’t happen, did it.
Makewi
@General Winfield Stuck:
It’s so cute when you think you know what’s going on.
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
Then there’s the other kind of troll, carrying water for the fallen Bush/wingnut nightmare we are trying to escape from, the quasi racist numbnut Makewi and compatriates.
kay
@Makewi:
I think they’re sincere in their family life. That it comports with the family life conservatives claim to prize is coincidental.
How can I trust you guys if you got Michelle Obama so completely wrong? Michelle isn’t anything close to “radical”. She lives what Sarah Palin babbles about ; the whole striving middle class, education as the great leveler meme.
Of course Americans responded to that. Everyone wants their children to do well. Conservatives missed that? Wow.
General Winfield Stuck
Geesh, I think I kilt two threads today. And now it’s TGIF.
James
@aimai:
Well, maybe you are second-to-last post..
You know, it’s strange. Originally I just added that link to Vega because I thought it relevant to the Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner study. I’m not exactly advocating for the position in any real way. I was just trying to clarify what Vega was saying, for those who hadn’t read the link. He’s a political strategist, not an anthropologist. I guess I should have added “xenophobia” the “nativism” in trying to explain his position. And it is a position for political strategy, to be clear. I botched the whole explanation, apparently.
Makewi
@kay:
I disagree with the Obamas on matters of policy, and on matters of instituting policy. I have some small quibbles with them on issues of politics, as politicians tend to be less than forthright. Lastly, despite his rhetoric his us vs them shtick is the same as the rest. Nature of the beast and all that.
I don’t know anything about the “radical” label, but I can tell you that they are hardly centrist, or at least haven’t been so far, and those on the wings usually get the radical label attached at some point.
@General Winfield Stuck:
Again, it’s so totally cute when you think you know what’s going on. Racist.
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
It’s all you dude.
ksmiami
Makewi – if that is your real name; Matt Yglesias had some posts earlier this year that the support of the Democratic party from people with non-Palinesque backgrounds / ethnicities is as a result of the fact that Democratic POLICIES actually are more beneficial to these groups (and women too) and also there is a path to real leadership for these voters if they choose to work within the Democratic party. It has been happening since Nixon and what is so funny to me is watching the remnant GOP run around saying WHY DON’T THEY LOVE US after the GOP has continually demonized non WECs for so long and for the fact that GOP policies laid bare do very little to benefit to anyone except for a few robber barons who are insane and live in Texas. And frankly as an ivy-educated, pretty well-off American anglo, the GOP platform is insulting as hell and so angry that it has scared off sane people. So please, don’t say that the Democratic party equates the GOP with evil racists, you guys have done it to yourselves;
Makewi
Sure, sure. It has nothing to do with having positions twisted into meaning the most nefarious thing possible. Like, for example, a position which is strong on immigration control is painted as xenophobic and/or hostile to hispanics.
This whole GOP as evil racist robber barons is like a security blanket. I don’t take anyone who plops it out very seriously.
Makewi
@General Winfield Stuck:
Wow. Your cut and paste skills are magnificent. Your mommy must be very proud of you.
section9
Jesus, eric. I’m a Republican, and even I get over to Huffpo more than you apparently do.
I mean, that’s what you True Believers are like. Progressives are condescending turds who generalize about their political opponents. I mean, go upthread and freakin’ look!
If it’s any consolation, so are the extreme Righties; you know, like, Paleocons.
At least you’re in good company.
PaulB
No, actually, you can’t, because “centrist” is precisely what they are, both in terms of where their policies fit on the political spectrum and in terms of public support for those policies. But then, you already knew that and just wanted to play silly games, as usual.