Is the Tea Party movement fundamentally bigoted? Ditto for modern Republicanism, which increasingly takes its cues from the tea partiers. Bob Somerby has been unhappy with sweeping liberal charges of racism against the entire movement for some time, and today, responding to a Digby post about Glenn Beck’s rally this weekend, he says so again:
Obviously, it wasn’t an all-white audience, but it felt good to say so (or something). Most people weren’t in lawn chairs, but that conveys an image….That said, we were most struck by Digby’s focus on skin color, a mocking focus which then extended into her readers’ comments. (Along with mocking comments about the age and clothing of the people who attended Beck’s event, including some first-hand observations.)….The people at the event were pink skinned; they are also “dumb as dirt,” we were told in an earlier post. Sorry, but this is the type of language adopted by haters worldwide, language which will be aimed at hundreds of thousands or millions of folk at a time.
Calling broad swathes of the electorate dumb and bigoted is probably not a great vote-getting strategy. But is it true? Here is Christopher Hitchens for the defense:
One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority.
….This summer [] has been the perfect register of the new anxiety, beginning with the fracas over Arizona’s immigration law, gaining in intensity with the proposal by some Republicans to amend the 14th Amendment so as to de-naturalize “anchor babies,” cresting with the continuing row over the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque, and culminating, at least symbolically, with a quasi-educated Mormon broadcaster calling for a Christian religious revival from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
What is the right way to talk about this? I think Bob has a point: calling people stupid racists just isn’t very bright. For the most part it probably isn’t true, and even to the extent it is, it’s bad electoral politics to harp on it. Calling an individual person racist for some particular action is fine if it’s justified. Ditto for specific groups with overtly racist agendas. But entire movements? Probably not.
On the other hand, can we talk? You’d have to literally be blind not to notice that the Fox/Rush/Drudge axis has been pushing racial hot buttons with abandon all summer. There’s all the stuff Hitchens mentions, and you can add to that the Shirley Sherrod affair, the continuing salience of the birther conspiracy theories, the New Black Panthers, and Beck’s obsession with Barack Obama’s supposed sympathy with “liberation theology.” Are we supposed to simply pretend that it’s just a coincidence that virtually every week brings another new faux controversy that just happens to appeal to the widespread, inchoate fear of a non-white country that Hitchens writes about?
For what it’s worth, I think this is a genuinely hard question. I don’t feel like putting my head in the sand and pretending that the leaders of the conservative movement don’t know exactly what they’re doing. On the other hand, like Bob, I’m not really on board with dismissing half the country as bozos and racists either.
So how do you thread this needle? How do you talk honestly about all the racially charged paranoia oozing out from conservative leaders without also implicating half the country as willing racists? I’m not sure.
