Jimmy Carter’s political touch remains, it appears, eternally off-key. After a
summer of simmering right-wing dissent against the Obama administration, and
a protest march by about 70,000 conservative activists in Washington, Carter
declared that most opposition to Barack Obama was rooted in racism.
He was responding to the unprecedented heckling of a sitting president from
the floor of Congress by a good old boy from South Carolina, Joe Wilson.
This is how Carter put it — and the nuances matter:
“Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on
whether we should have a national programme on healthcare. It’s deeper than
that. I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated
animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a
black man ... That racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled
up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in
the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified
to lead this great country.”
Few words would have caused Obama more heartburn than these. Obama has, from
the start, emphasised the nonracial and post-racial aspects of his politics.
He feared that if he were to become the black president, rather than the
president who happens to be black, something deep in the American psyche
would kick in, and he would be marginalised for good. In the campaign, the
Clintons went up to the edge of this tactic, with Hillary at one point
appealing directly to “white voters” in the South, and Bill dismissing Obama
as another Jesse Jackson.
In the general campaign, Sarah Palin used codewords — that Obama was not a
“real American”. But somehow Obama remained unscathed. The closest he came
to racial immolation was when Fox News broadcast round-the-clock clips of
his former pastor Jeremiah Wright yelling “God damn America!”. But he
rescued himself with a speech of such sweep and candour that even his
fiercest critics relented.
He lost a lot of the white vote to John McCain, of course. And the vote
actually swung to Republicans in the Appalachian region, where racism is
strongest. But McCain refused to run a race-baiting campaign, either through
code or explicit association. And Obama won with a massive majority of
blacks and Hispanics and with a solid white bloc. After his victory, it
seemed as if the weight of history had been lifted. We should have known, of
course, that his election would be the beginning and not the end of this
racial narrative.
However, it’s important to note that Carter is almost certainly exaggerating.
Obama has lost some lustre — but he remains a popular president with
approval ratings above 50%. He’s put through massive changes to the system —
from the stimulus package to support the car industry to an outreach to the
Muslim world to a plan to overhaul health insurance. The last year has been
bewildering for many people — a recession that seemed caused by the very
bankers we bailed out, unemployment climbing relentlessly, the government
owning the car industry, debt going through the stratosphere, with no relief
in sight. It is in no way surprising that, under these circumstances,
attacks on the president would be coarse and rambunctious.
Remember the far left’s opposition to George W Bush before the Iraq war?
Equations of him with Hitler were routine. Columnists openly bragged about
hating him. Remember what was done to Clinton? An essentially centrist
president from the South was subjected to a wave of hysterical criticism,
hysteria, paranoia ... until he was impeached. Richard Nixon was a totem of
loathing for every educated liberal (and many educated conservatives) for
years. Lyndon Johnson was despised by his fellow Southerners. John F Kennedy
was called a communist and a traitor. This is not abnormal for America. It’s
a rough and unruly place, where the first amendment protects even the most
inflammatory speech. What Obama is enduring is not, in other words, utterly
out of the mainstream of political discourse in the US.
Nonetheless, Carter wasn’t merely posturing. He knows the South and most
Americans can pick up on nuances utterly lost to outsiders. Remember also
that Obama won few white Southern votes. And there is a tone to the
conversation recently that does indeed suggest that part of the country
finds it hard to accept Obama as a legitimate president. As soon as he
ceased to be a mere symbolic president, and started to change things, the
resistance suddenly became fierce and, to some extent, irrational. Of
course, race was in there somewhere. He’s black and powerful and,
unremarkably, part of the country feels as if it has lost its bearings. Of
course some attacks on him will be partly racist — because the racial divide
is still a big factor in American partisan competition.
The right in America, after all, was reborn after the civil rights struggle.
Before Johnson’s determination to protect black voting and education, the
South was overwhelmingly Democratic. After Johnson took on civil rights,
Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s Southern strategy — appealing to white
Southerners who were enraged by black equality — was critical to winning
electoral landslides. The Democrats believed — with reason — that race was a
factor in this realignment.
Fast-forward a few decades and the Democrats now constitute the majority in
much of the country once ruled by Republicans — the northeast, Midwest and
west — and have much less traction in the South. You also have a black
Democratic president — a concept that would have been simply incredible to
the older white generations who grew up with segregation. And Americans are
human; their politics is driven by reason and debate, but also by symbolism
and emotion and sentiment.
And so when a white congressman interrupts an address to call the president a
liar, there is a contempt in his voice that means something to Americans but
which may not resonate outside. There is, in The New York Times’s columnist
Maureen Dowd’s mind, an unheard “You lie, boy!” in it. “Boy” is how white
men condescended to black men in the South for centuries. And in last year’s
campaign, a Kentucky congressman did indeed say of Obama, “I’m going to tell
you something: that boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” In the
protest march last weekend, one sign said (complete with picture of a lion):
“The zoo has an African [lion] and the White House has a lyin’ African!” A
mayor’s e-mail in the last campaign showed the White House suddenly
surrounded by a watermelon patch.
What are we to make of the fact that in opinion polls, a big majority of
Republicans in the South — far more than in any other region of the country
— doubt that Obama is an American citizen? In the state of Virginia, which
Obama won, 70% of Republican voters believe he is not legitimately president
because he was, they believe, born in Kenya. Last week, a staggering poll
found that a third of Republicans in New Jersey believe that Obama was not
born in the US. And 17% of self-described conservatives in the same survey
said they believe the president is the Antichrist.
What explains this if not, to some degree, racism and xenophobia? It’s almost
ludicrous to look for more esoteric explanations. Obama is right to ignore
it — his finest skill is refusing to take the bait — but he cannot be under
any illusions that it’s out there. It is not, in my judgment, the core
motivation of those who marched on Washington last weekend. Their horror at
what they called a fascist and a communist president requires no racial
subtext — just good old American paranoia and extremism, which can be found
on right and left. But it does exist, and it’s silly to pretend that just
because a black president was elected, it suddenly vanished into thin air.
What disturbs me more is something subtler but more pernicious. There are
elements on the far right who are clearly trying to stir up racial animosity
by seizing on random events and trying to polarise the country through them,
and thereby polarise the country against Obama.
The radical populist Glenn Beck said on Fox News that Obama has “exposed
himself as a guy [with] a deep-seated hatred for white people”. He offered
no evidence for this: he just put it out there and refused to retract. Last
week, in one of the most baldly racist diatribes I have heard on American
radio, the biggest figure in the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh,
noticed that there had been a ruckus on a school bus in which a white kid
was stomped on by a black kid. The incident, it turned out, was a classic
school bus bully story: the white kid was being tormented and the bullies
were refusing to let him sit down. There was no racial rhetoric in a bus
full of black kids and white kids.
But this is what Limbaugh said: “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get
beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on,
right on’ ... I wonder if Obama’s going to come to the defence of the
assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.”
Limbaugh then mocked what he sees as political correctness in “Obama’s
America”: “We know that white students are destroying civility on buses,
white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white
congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives.” Get the
picture? There’s an implication that a racist president is actively trying
to hurt white America. Despite the local police chief’s insistence that race
had nothing to do with the incident, Limbaugh simply declared: “I think the
guy’s wrong. I think not only was it racism, it was justifiable racism. I
mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have
been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses. This is Obama’s America.”
The goal is to portray white Americans as besieged by a sea of blackness,
capped by Obama’s presidency. And, in a reference that would be clearly
understood, Limbaugh proposed re-segregation in order to protect white
people.
Limbaugh was echoed by one of the most popular Republican bloggers, Michelle
Malkin, who described the bullying as “racial thuggery”. In the same week,
Beck ran exposé after exposé of Acorn, a corrupt group that tries to
enfranchise minorities, and of a black appointee of Obama’s, Van Jones, who
had dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Yes, these were legitimate issues,
and absolutely worth reporting, but after a while, you sense a pattern. If
America has a president who has “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and
he’s destroying America, and backs a black Harvard friend against a white
cop ... well, you get the picture. “We came unarmed (this time)” read one
poster in Washington last weekend. Was that a sterling defence of the second
amendment’s assurance of the right to bear arms? Or something of a threat?
We do not know. But what we do know is that this kind of discourse is not only
vulgar and ugly but dangerous. Fomenting a race war to undermine a black
president is incendiary, perilous stuff. This is a country that has shot its
most charismatic presidents. And Limbaugh is not weighing the pros and cons
of particular policies. “I wanted him to fail from the get-go,” was his
refrain last week. And if racial hatred can help Limbaugh find a way to
force Obama to fail, he has no hesitation — and some amount of glee — in
using it.
Beneath the surface there is considerable cultural anxiety. America is not the
country it used to be. It’s far more racially diverse than in any previous
era, and the demographics show that without black and Hispanic votes, the
Republicans may be consigned to long-term electoral doom. The collapse of
the conservative movement under Bush has left many bewildered and angry. A
majority-minority country beckons and the right is as scared as it is
furious. They voted Republican ... and the debt exploded, spending went
through the roof, two wars became quagmires of nation-building, and gay
marriage came to America. Of course this leads to some paranoia, fear and
unruliness. Any brief foray into American history would predict nothing less.
But there is something a little different this time — and it’s because the
president is a little different this time. One of the most common signs last
weekend said simply: “I want my country back”. This could be a response to
the huge increase in government power under Bush and during the financial
crisis, continued by Obama. Or it could be a cry of racial, cultural panic.
Or, more plausibly, it could be a fusion of the two that renders the entire
picture extremely volatile.
One way to mitigate this would be for Republicans to craft policies that might
appeal more to blacks and Hispanics, to recruit more minorities and to
embrace immigrants. This is what Bush was trying to do — and, in retrospect,
seems positively liberal. But another way is to so racially polarise America
that so many white votes flee from the black president that a Republican is
elected by whites alone. Divide and rule is the tactic: as crude as it could
be effective.
Obama understands that if he were to take this bait, and attack the racism out
there, he would lose. Limbaugh understands this too — and he has a much
tighter grip on the Republican base than any current politician. And so in
the cultural context, Limbaugh is all about riling people up and Obama is
all about calming them down. It’s a war of nerves that Obama needs to
transform into something much less compelling. He has to bore his way
towards acceptance.
Limbaugh, on the other hand, makes a vast fortune from such forays into the
gutter and has no incentive to stop. The key for him is to generate a
narrative that compounds Obama’s race with his policies. And so Obama’s
policies are shredded daily — Limbaugh has the biggest single talkradio
audience in America — while Limbaugh plays ditties like “Barack, the Magic
Negro”, and calls the president a “Halfrican”. And this man now controls the
current Republican party’s message. It is as if the party’s super-ego was
removed by Dick Cheney, its ego left town with Bush, and its id is all that
remains: full of sound and racial fury signifying money.
Obama, on the other hand, knows that a racially polarised America will be too
distracted to address health insurance reform or climate change or the debt
or the wars or anything else. And so he has to somehow plough on through the
emotive racial minefield, denying the racial angle, and hoping that reason
will eventually triumph over emotion. One speech, as in the Jeremiah Wright
brouhaha, will not suffice any more. He’s president now, not a candidate. He
has a lifetime of experience dealing with this; but it cannot be easy. And
it will not be over soon.
www.andrewsullivan.com
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