Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America
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Like Savage, but far more eloquent, Buchanan feels a forced cultural conversion is under way: “Without the assent of her people, America is being converted from a Christian country, nine in 10 of whose people traced their roots to Europe as late as the time of JFK, into a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural Tower of Babel not seen since the late Roman Empire.”8
And Buchanan laments the new heroes of our evolving multicultural America: “Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.”9
The fact that Pat singled out not one but two members of the Confederate Army—including the now semi-obscure Jackson, whom southern Civil War historian Shelby Foote once described as having “a curious indifference to suffering”—speaks to the impulses behind this allegedly pro-America traditionalist movement.10
But a more popular metaphor than the defeated Confederacy is the founding of the United States, the American political scripture of the War of Independence.
Opposition to health-care reform was presented in online ads as a re-creation of the Continental Army’s struggle against British tyranny, recast as a struggle for individual freedom against British-style big government health care. It’s not a policy debate but a life-or-death fight for the soul of America, pitting conservatives against liberals, patriots against tyrants. The president’s position is therefore fundamentally un-American.
This call provokes a response. At the 9/12 march, scattered among the crowd were dozens of folks who’d responded to an online call to wear Revolutionary War period garb, so as to make their deeper allegiance clear. The e-mail notice said reams about their hotbox loss of perspective: Continental Soldiers Wanted for 9/12 March: Attention all Revolutionary War re-enactors: arise, ye Patriots, to the hallowed cause of liberty! If you have a Revolutionary-era uniform—be it militia, frontiersman, rifleman, musician or regular Continental Army—please bring it with you to the 9-12 march and be part of the Continental fife and drum procession that will be leading the march. What better way to send a message to those who would take away our liberty than to remind them WE have not forgotten those who sacrificed so much to give us our liberty.11
Beyond the odd enthusiasm for fife and drum re-enactments, the broader point is one of fidelity to the Founding Fathers’ America. These marchers see themselves as defending America’s heritage against a usurper in the White House who wants to “take away our liberty.” In their eyes, Obama doesn’t understand the national heritage because he’s not part of it—he’s an internationalist who grew up in Indonesia with the middle name Hussein. He’s not one of “us”—his administration is called a “Thugocracy” or a “Gangster Government.” They point to the comment Michelle Obama made during the campaign—“For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country”—as evidence the president doesn’t take pride in our nation’s history. He doesn’t share our heritage. He’s not a real American.
Think back to the rapturous response Sarah Palin got in what she called “real America.” She debuted the divisive sound bite at a speech in Greensboro, North Carolina: “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.”12
Of course, if “real America” is pro-American, than there is also a false America—by implication, the increasingly diverse and urban areas where most Americans now live—which is anti-American. This is an applause line for people staring into the political abyss.
Palin’s “real America” riffs were not meant to be about race directly, but they applied almost exclusively to white small-town America.
Candidate Obama validated the fears of the emerging white minority—and the perception of him as an over-educated elitist—when he unwisely and unkindly disparaged the “bitter” working-class Americans of western Pennsylvania: “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”13
Unlike previous African-American presidential candidates, Obama rarely referred to his race on the campaign trail—he was determined not to run a protest candidacy like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton before him. He wasn’t running to be the president of black America, he was running to be the president of the United States of America. But there were moments where the curtain came back on the role of race.
In Virginia, Bobbie May, the chairman of the Buchanan County McCain campaign, was forced to resign after he published an article in a local paper describing “The clarified platform of Barack Hussein Obama.” It included the Second Amendment applying only to “gang-bangers” and “Islamo-fascist terrorists,” “free drugs for Obama’s inner city political base,” “mandatory Black Liberation Theology courses taught in all churches” and hiring the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black. The kicker predicted lines we’ve heard endlessly since: Obama wants to “change liberty and freedom to socialism and communism.”14
Throughout the campaign there was the occasional racially overtoned vandalism of Obama field offices, and not infrequent outbursts from crowds. In eastern Ohio, news cameras caught flashes of unfiltered racial anxiety at a GOP rally, with one woman saying, “I’m afraid that if he wins the Blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian, this is a Christian Nation, what is our country going to end up like?”15 Another said, “I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash, because we are not.”
At a Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, amateur camera crews caught crowds yelling out “Osama Obama,” “the only difference between Obama and Osama is the BS,” “Hussein Mohammed Obama” and “Al Qaeda for Obama”—the confluence of Muslim rumors and terrorist fears—while one heavyset guy sported a Curious George monkey doll with a Obama bumper sticker on its head and paraded it before the camera with a cackle, saying: “This is little Hussein. Little Hussein wanted to see truth and good Americans.”16
Another incident was revealing in the response it provoked. Two weeks before the election, McCain volunteer Ashley Todd claimed that she had been attacked at an ATM near Pittsburgh by a six-foot-tall, 200-pound black man who saw her McCain bumper sticker, stole $60 and carved a “B” in her face. She said he told her: “You are going to be a Barack supporter.”
Todd quickly became a conservative cause célèbre—evidence of an incipient race war that would be no doubt great for ratings and possibly for election results. Fox News senior vice president for news editorial John Moody fired off a grave op-ed on the online FoxForum, titled—ironically, “Moment of Truth.”
It had to happen. Less than two weeks before we vote for a new president, a white woman says a black man attacked her, then scarred her face, and says there was a political motive for it. . . . This incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election. If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.17
Eighteen hours later, Todd admitted she’d fabricated her tale to get attention for herself and the McCain campaign. A cadre of conservative commentators quietly muttered a collective “never mind,” but the impulse to climb the barricades of racial conflict was chilling.
On Election Day, the results of these appeals to “real America” came into clearer focus. In a country that is becoming more diverse and urban, McCain and Palin found their strongest support from older white traditionalist voters in towns with populations under 50,000.18
Dig a little deeper and a fuller picture emerges. Yes, Obama did better than past Democratic tickets in many areas—for example, winning Indiana and Virginia for the first time since 1964. But in the Deep South, he did far worse than past Democrats, losing the forty-nine counties of
Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana where whites make up 90 percent or more of the population.19 This is an expression of white minority politics, feeling under siege.
Since the election, the racial gap has only grown. An October National Journal poll found job approval for President Obama deeply divided between 43 percent for whites and 74 percent for non-whites while two-thirds of whites believed that living standards for “people like me” wouldn’t grow as fast as they had for previous generations. “Whites are not only more anxious,” wrote National Journal’s Ron Brownstein, “but also more alienated.”20
The most striking gap is the attitudes between whites and non-whites when it comes to the federal government— whites don’t trust it, non-whites do. It’s an old wound that’s getting wider.
From the 1860s through the 1960s—from the Civil War to the civil rights era—the federal government was seen as the defender of minorities and an imposition on the white South. During Reconstruction, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau was attacked as “an agency to keep the negro in idleness at the expense of the white man,” echoing today’s “big government” welfare state critiques. 21 The move to disenfranchise African-American voting rights through Jim Crow laws occurred under the cloak of states’ rights and a white “counter-revolution” to re-establish local control with the rallying cry “the niggers shall not rule over us!”22 Almost a century later, when segregation was confronted by Supreme Court rulings, no less than the National Review editorialized, “The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answering is yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being it is the advanced race.”23 White minority politics likes to get dressed up as civic conscience in the face of unconstitutional federal interference: Witness how the White Citizens Councils of the segregated South of the 1950s and 1960s were reborn in the 1980s and 1990s as the Councils of Conservative Citizens.
These fights have deep roots even as they have taken on new urgency with the presence of an African-American president. One big question remains: How did the Party of Lincoln get left behind on civil rights?
The Party of Lincoln in Name Only
It’s an historic irony that the political party that long defended slavery and racial segregation became the first to nominate an African-American for president, while the Party of Lincoln, which fought for Union and advanced civil rights from Reconstruction to Little Rock, has been left with a pathetic lack of diversity on its political bench.
This role reversal is reflected in the GOP’s political philosophy as well. Lincoln’s Republican Party was the centrist progressive party of its day, expanding individual freedom and embracing change to preserve the union. The modern Republican Party, however, finds philosophical structure in federalism and states’ rights, conservative concepts that defined southern Democrats of the John C. Calhoun variety. And perhaps not coincidentally, the party’s strongest support now comes from the rebellious states of the former Confederacy.
The legacy of Lincoln and the Civil War has formed the basic fault lines of American politics for the past 150 years, for better and worse. From 1860 to 1960, the current “red” and “blue” states were reversed, with the former slave-owning South voting solidly Democratic for 100 years while Republicans generally dominated the North. For all the shifts in party labels since then, Southern conservatives have been consistent. They were conservatives because they believed the rights of individual states had primacy over the interfering federal government. Before the Civil War, they did not want their profitable industry restricted or regulated. They wanted to preserve what they saw as a biblically sanctioned way of life. In 1860, the election of Illinois’s Abraham Lincoln was enough to make South Carolina fire on Fort Sumter and secede—resisting the results of the election as an unconstitutional usurpation of power. The South did not want northern values imposed upon it. John Wilkes Booth spoke for many in the vanquished South when he shouted “Sic semper tyrannis”—“Thus always with tyrants”—after shooting Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre days after the end of the war.
During Reconstruction, African-Americans were not only freed but elevated to elected office—including the Congress and governorships—as Republicans. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was formed by Confederate veterans like Nathan Bedford Forrest to resist Reconstruction and to intimidate blacks. This was done in the name of defending the integrity of the white southern family, but the larger political agenda was clear: “In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party,” wrote historian Eric Foner in his book Reconstruction.24 In time, the federal troops withdrew from the South. Segregation was imposed along with the renewed dominance of the Democratic Party. The few local Republicans left were brave liberal reformers, a minority party in every sense.
Outside the South—throughout the North, Midwest and West—the smart money remained with the Republicans. From Ulysses S. Grant to William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, they were the party of federal power and patronage, the party of industrial expansion and the Gilded Age. All the while, the South stayed stubbornly Democratic. People who lose wars have long memories, and they were not about to vote for the Party of Lincoln.
The pendulum of political power eventually swung back to the Democrats, whose national political dominance reached its peak with FDR’s four-term New Deal coalition of liberal reformers, big-city bosses, union leaders, farmers and southern conservatives—held together by the benefits of power and the glue of crises. This coalition began to crack with Harry Truman, who desegregated the armed forces by executive order after World War II as southerners howled. When at the 1948 Democratic convention, the young liberal mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, proposed that the party platform back anti-segregation civil rights legislation, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond stormed off the convention floor, leading a delegation of social conservative pro-segregation southern Dixiecrats. He mounted a third-party Dixiecrat campaign for the presidency that year, with the intention of proving the South’s power by denying Democrats the White House. Strom won four states in the Deep South—South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, but Truman stayed in the White House.25
But it was the expansion of federal power from the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren—a Republican former governor of California, appointed to the bench by Eisenhower—that really alienated conservatives and put the Republican Party on the path to renouncing the legacy of Lincoln.
In 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, Warren cultivated a unanimous decision outlawing segregation. But some conservatives wanted to stand athwart its history and yell “Stop.”
“We consider the Supreme Court’s decision in the key segregation cases (Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe) to be one of the most brazen acts of judicial usurpation in our history,” editorialized the National Review, “patently counter to the intent of the Constitution, shoddy and illegal in analysis, and invalid in sociology”26 The fear of betrayal by the court has persisted in the intensity with which conservatives fight to keep “liberals” off the bench today and renounce alleged RINO (Republican in Name Only) judges like Sandra Day O’Connor.
The ground was shifting beneath the political map. It finally flipped 100 years after the Civil War when southern Democratic President Lyndon Johnson proposed civil rights legislation.
Some conservative Republicans smelled electoral opportunity in the Democrats’ shift. It came in the form of the missing piece of the post-Civil War political puzzle—the western libertarian conservative. While North and South were fighting, the West was still being won by pioneers with lots of guns and little government.
Enter Barry Goldwater, born in the Arizona territory in 1909. Goldwater’s libertarian values were clear and consistent. He helped create the modern conservative movement
with his absolute belief in individual freedom from government control. But there was one gnawing exception.
Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like Republican icons Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who also opposed the act, Goldwater was no segregationist—he had desegregated his family’s department store and the Arizona Air National Guard. But on advice from Phoenix lawyer and future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist, Goldwater decided that the Civil Rights Act was an unconstitutional infringement upon states’ rights.
“It may be just or wise or expedient for Negro children to attend the same school as white children,” Goldwater reasoned, “but they do not have a civil right to do so which is protected by the federal Constitution or which is enforceable by the federal government.”27
At the 1964 GOP convention, Goldwater famously declared “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Jackie Robinson had been campaigning for Goldwater’s primary Republican opponent, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller—who was shouted down at the convention for proposing a platform condemning extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. “A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP,” wrote Robinson. “I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”28