Sunday, October 28, 2012

Fear and Loathing: Hallmarks of the Right/GOP

The unvarnished hate and loathing that the Christianists, Tea Party crowd and their political whores in the Republican Party are directing at their political opponents and those who are not white, heterosexual, conservative Christians seems to be intensifying.  In fact, it seems that the virulent hate has hit new levels during the current 2012 campaign season.  The types of open hatred range from anti-gay marriage opponents in Maryland who have proclaimed that gays and their supporters "deserve death" to the GOP's repeated use of dog whistle phrases to appeal to the open racism of the white evangelicals and Mitt Romney's contempt for the 47% of Americans who Romney deems to be parasites and about who he feels no need to have concern.  It's all very ugly and clearly shows the hypocrisy of those who claim to be "godly Christians" even as the totally dishonor the Gospel message.  A piece in Salon makes the argument that what we are seeing is the last foul gasp of the Christofacists and racists who realize that their days of dominance and privilege may soon be gone.  These people may not win the ultimate battle for America's soul, but they clearly intend to inflict as much harm and divisiveness as possible while they can.  Here are some article highlights:

[T]he far right has an unfortunate legacy of racism, sexism and homophobia  .  .  .  .  but the kind of hatred that I’m talking about goes way beyond ordinary politics and deep into the realm of abnormal psychology. In its full-blown manifestations, it is akin to what an ophidiophobe feels at the sight of a snake: visceral and existential; categorical and absolute. It turns on the gut certainty that your adversaries aren’t looking just to raise your taxes but to destroy your whole way of life: that they are not only wrongheaded, but preternaturally evil.

When Mitt Romney promised to “keep America America” and Michele Bachmann launched a witch hunt against Muslims in the State Department, when Newt Gingrich called Obama a “food stamp president” and Rick Santorum railed against the “elite, smart people” who will never be “on our side,” those were the buttons that were being pushed.  Conspiratorial shibboleths are seeded throughout the GOP platform, .  .  .

And of course there is race. From the destruction of North America’s indigenous inhabitants to the importation of Africans as chattel slaves, from Jim Crow to racially targeted voter suppression efforts today, race has played as fraught a role in the American psyche as Freud believed sex did for bourgeois Austrians. “Affirmative action” and “reparations” are two of the most resonant buzzwords in the rhetorical arsenal of the right. Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa has accused Obama of plotting to make taxpayers pay slavery reparations to American blacks.

But as much as the extreme right might have hated FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton and even Eisenhower, Nixon and George H.W. Bush, President Obama is the visible embodiment of everything that they fear the most. He is an elite Harvard lawyer and the bearer of a foreign name.  .  .  .  . 
Most of all, Obama has dark skin.

But as noisome as all this fear and loathing may be, I suspect it will prove less influential than one might expect in the long term .  .  .  .  The great arc of American history bends toward greater, not lesser, tolerance and open-mindedness.

The writing is already on the wall. According to the U.S. Census, 50.4 percent of the babies born in the U.S. between July 2010 and July 2011 were minorities — up from 37 percent in 1990. In “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Pat Buchanan envisions an America in which whites “may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” Go to a meeting of white nationalists, and you’ll quickly learn that their deepest fears are demographic. “White Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people,” writes Dr. Michael Hill, the president of the neo-Confederate League of the South. 

No matter how this election turns out, the endgame has already begun: America is becoming more multicultural, more gay-friendly and more feminist every day. But as every hunter knows, a wounded or cornered quarry is the most dangerous. Even as the white, patriarchal, Christian hegemony declines, its backlash politics become more vicious. They may succeed in turning back the clock for some time.

The description of the far right and Christofascists as cornered and wounded animals is actually quite apt in my view.  They certainly have the same type of viciousness and desperation.

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