Fear tactics causing backlash

Tom Maertens
The Mankato Free Press
Mon Oct 4, 2010

According to recent polls, 46 percent of Republicans believe, erroneously, that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and 27 percent doubt that he is a citizen. Another poll, by CNN/Opinion Research, found that 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was definitely or probably not born in the United States and that he supports imposing Sharia law on the United States. Another 24 percent believe Obama might be the anti-Christ.

Newt Gingrich has written that Obama is more of a threat to the nation than the Nazis or the Communists were, and warned of a “stealth” campaign to impose Sharia law; his rant about Obama’s “anti-colonialist mentality” is thinly-disguised racism. Tom Tancredo called President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today.”

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have portrayed Obama as a racist who hates white people, a message that resonates with those who feel white culture is under assault from growing minorities. Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily is concerned that Obama has never publicly denounced Lucifer, and Beck, a Mormon, has decreed that Obama is not a true Christian.

What we are seeing is a full-blown white backlash against our first black president, the result of public fear-mongering and race-baiting, including rewriting civil rights history to make white people into victims and to portray Obama’s policies as representing a “foreign” ideology, usually socialism or fascism.

Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” describes an apocalyptic mentality that sees all political differences as a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and that believes sinister forces are infiltrating at the highest level of power in order to destroy our way of life. Previous suspects have included the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, Jews, “One-world government,” and of course, Communists.

Hofstadter wrote that for the “radical right,” politics “becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies.” Some people and organizations exploit this reality. The NRA — a virtual subsidiary of the Republican Party — stirs up the paranoid “cold-dead-hands” crowd every election with claims that Democrats plan to confiscate their guns, a plan so secret even Democrats don’t seem to know about it.

The radical right is particularly susceptible to fear-mongering and disinformation because they live inside the right-wing media bubble. This and economic stresses have produced such groups as the Birthers, Truthers, Oathers, and Tenthers that led the angry town-hall protests that morphed into the Tea Party, which was then captured by Republican lobbyists.

The anti-intellectualism of people like Sarah Palin is part of the mix, and reflected in later teabaggers such as Christine O’Donnell, who thinks American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals to produce mice with fully-functioning human brains. Some Tea Party rhetoric still reflects the extremism of its original adherents. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada, has publicly proposed “Second Amendment remedies” for “domestic enemies” in Congress. Like gunning them down?

The Colorado Tea Party candidate for governor, Dan Maes, has charged that Denver’s planned bicycle-sharing program was a “strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.” The Black Helicopter crowd doesn’t explain why the UN wants to “rein in” American cities or what evidence exists for such a conspiracy.

Whatever its origins, the Tea Party is now led by career Republican operatives, such as Sal Russo of Tea Party Express and Dick Armey of Freedom Works, who labor to keep the original radical-right activists off camera.

Tea Party funding comes overwhelmingly from what Bill Clinton has termed “ultra right-wing corporate interests” such as the billionaire Koch brothers, and laundered through patriotic-sounding front groups (See www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer.) As David Axelrod, Obama’s adviser, noted: “This is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Their hidden-hand financing will continue to reorient the Tea Party toward their corporatist agenda of eliminating (“privatizing”) Social Security, cutting Medicare, reducing taxation, weakening labor unions and rolling back government regulations that restrict their right, for example, to pollute. And redistributing wealth upward.

But their tactics are unchanged and involve discrediting and even demonizing Obama and the federal government. Their message is supported by tens of millions of dollars of corporate-funded vitriol channeled through the right-wing media-political complex, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and echoed by unscrupulous, opportunistic politicians like Newt Gingrich. This combination has “manufactured” much of the outrage we are seeing, particularly on the paranoid right, producing in turn the white backlash.

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