Matthew Yglesias: Here Come the Racists

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Here Come the Racists

by Matthew Yglesias

During the campaign, Barack Obama’s enemies seemed reluctant to smear him with ugly rhetoric. But as The Daily Beast’s Matthew Yglesias points out, the last week has seen it come out in full force.



White America proved ready last fall to accept an African-American president. But in the eyes of some on the right, it was as if Barack Obama’s election meant that any talk of racial discrimination in America had to end. How else to explain the firestorm of controversy set off by the president of the United States offering the banal observation that there is "a long history" of "African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately," and that a police department that arrests a man inside his own home and winds up dropping the charges has acted “stupidly”? But as soon as the president spoke, the right wing pounced, smelling blood.

The Gates affair was the opening right-wingers used to pummel Obama with race-based attacks—to prove that America’s first post-racial presidency was anything but. On July 26, Fox's Brit Hume whined on air that "to be labeled a racist" in today's America is very bad, which has "placed into the hands of certain people a weapon" that can be wielded against poor, defenseless white America. One might think that the existence of social opprobrium against racists was a good thing and certainly an improvement from the recent past in which such opprobrium was directed at interracial couples and it was commonly impossible for Southern blacks to vote.

Either way, run-amok anti-racism doesn't seem to have stopped Hume's Fox News colleague Glenn Beck, who opined on July 28 that Obama had "exposed himself as a guy" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture."

Given that the roster of white people in Obama's life includes his mother, his vice president, his chief of staff, his chief political aide, the majority of his Cabinet, etc., the hatred strikes me as unlikely to be all that deep-seated. Rather, as with the absurd campaign by Newt Gingrich and others to brand Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist," we're seeing the extreme racial paranoia that has characterized the American right for decades.

These sentiments long predate Obama's rise to the White House or any particular actions on his part. Popular conservative talk-radio host Michael Savage self-published a 1991 book called The Death of the White Male at a time when there wasn't so much as a black member of the United States Senate. But it's perhaps not surprising that America's first African-American president would prompt an outburst of racial anxiety and racist attacks. Indeed, many observers were expecting more of this sort of thing during the campaign. That it's only emerging in a big way now illustrates the paucity of appealing political leaders on the contemporary American right. During the presidential campaign, John McCain himself was, for obvious reasons, the most prominent face of American conservatism. And McCain was a practical politician looking to appeal to a majority. He was also a quite popular figure, whose approval rating remained over 50 percent even as he ultimately lost the election to an even-more-popular Obama. Under the circumstances, he had strong incentives to avoid the sort of hyper-ugly rhetoric that could easily prompt a backlash.

Today, though, Republican congressional leaders are gray nonentities like Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell. That leaves the right wing's public presentation dominated by Fox News personalities, and the likes of Gingrich and Michelle Malkin, who recently dubbed Obama a "racial opportunist." Such figures aren't trying to build a viable electoral coalition; they're just competing for the intense devotion of a narrow segment of the conservative base. You can have a hit cable show with only a trivial fraction of the overall population watching, and you raise funds for your political organization by attracting a relatively small number of devoted followers. And a certain segment thrills to this sort of rhetoric.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-03/here-come-the-racists/full/