Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity
Good column from Greenwald:
Charles Krauthammer,The Washington Post, today:
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion.Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
A new CNN poll has found that most Americans think gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married. . . . As polling-statistics blogger Nate Silver points out, the margin of error [as well as the poll's status as the first to find majority approval] means we can’t assume that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, but it is "no longer safe to say that opposition to same-sex marriage is the majority position . . . . "
That particular factual inaccuracy, which I am 100% certain will never be corrected by the Post, is the least of the problems with Krauthammer’s column today. Above all else, he seeks to delegitimize concerns over the Right’s intensifying use of racially and ethnically divisive tactics as nothing more than the last refuge of a Democratic Party which, he argues, espouses unpopular policies and thus has no means of winning an election other than by falsely accusing its opponents of bigotry.
It requires extreme blindness or extreme dishonesty to deny that our politics is more racially and ethnically polarized than it has been in a long time. Virtually every Fox News/right-wing-talk-radio controversy relies on scaring economically anxious white Americans into ignoring the prime cause of their economic insecurity — plundering by Wall Street bankers, abetted by the government they own — and focusing instead on some manufactured menace from powerless racial and ethnic minorities: black people preventing them from voting (New Black Panthers), stealing their elections (ACORN), and treating them unequally (Shirley Sherrod and Eric Holder’s Justice Department); Muslims who want to conquer their country and celebrate over their Christian corpses (the Triumphalist Ground Zero Mosque); invading, marauding Latino armies coming to steal their property and rape their women while their Marxist allies in Government (led by a black Muslim President) disarm the white victims. Matt Taibbi, in lamenting the takeover of the GOP by the most riled-up of these factions — the Tea Partiers — recounts just some of the lowlights here.
Cowardly and opportunistic Democratic politicians have only added to this inflammatory brew. When the execrable, desperate Harry Reid isn’t feeding this majoritarian paranoia by demanding that the Park51 community center move, he’s seeking to capitalize on it through explicit advocacy of ethnic-based voting in order to salvage his worthless political career. The American Right has no hope of recovering from its Bush-era implosion except by aggressively exploiting ethnic and racial resentments — the most telling statement of the last year was probably Glenn Beck’s pronouncement on Fox that Obama is a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" — but many career Democratic politicians, such as Reid, are so disliked that their only hope for staying in power is to milk those same divisions to their own advantage, often by conflating justifiable, substantive opposition to Democratic rule with the ugly bigotry fueled by the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh circus. An incumbent Party which has presided over extreme economic suffering has little to offer other than dredging up fear — much of it well-grounded — in the alternative (you may despise what we’re doing in power, but look at those hateful, bigoted freaks over there).
The real problem is …
