This past week or so I’ve been taking a long, hard look at the issues of race, Obama’s speech, politics in general, and how to make sense of it all. It’s been difficult, frankly. I’ve read a lot of good stuff over at Orcinus and of course the Double G.
Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Basically, Glenn Greenwald talks about what he calls “threatened tribalism”:
There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than “threatened tribalism.” The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.
The sentiments expressed here by Instapunk are now most commonly expressed towards the New Enemy — the Muslim — but the Wright episode is a nice reminder of how seamlessly it gets directed towards a whole host of other threatening, bad groups. Hence the blithe application of the term “sleeper cells” to black Americans. That’s what coalesces them and justifies everything. What matters is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.
And as usual, the Double G is spot on. Dave Newiert at Orcinus calls this attitude “the new racism”:
which really is just a slightly modified version of the truly vicious belief system that has been lying, like a cancer waiting to metastasize, from the body of movement conservatism for the many years since it was forced into semi-dormancy some 40 years ago. With folks like Rush Limbaugh leading the way, I describe it thus:
[It is] a trend in right-wing comentary, staking out positions that, if not overtly racist, at least seek to resurrect some of the hoary mythology of the era of white supremacy. As with most of right-wing race rhetoric of the past twenty years, it’s all done with a certain level of plausible deniability, couched in “jokes” or abstrations that let the speakers feign indignation when the racism is pointed out; the current trend is only slightly more overt in its racism, but the underlying sentiments aren’t hard to read.
It’s a step beyond wink-and-nudge racism — or, perhaps, more like that point in the winking and nudging when the winker begins nudging harder and harder.
Trying to distill it down even further I had a bit of an eureka moment. Absolutely everything in modern Republican politics can be explained by three little words, and I mean absolutely everything. Those three words?
“US VERSUS THEM”.
That’s it. It seems so simple. Everything that the GOP does, thinks, feels, emotes, or even dreams about can be summed up perfectly and succinctly by “us versus them”.
Us, of course, is always defined as the good guys, the white hats, the cavalry, the defenders of all things Good.
Them, of course, is always defined as the Enemy, the polar opposite of Us, the bad guys, the villains, the perpetrators of all things Evil.
Pick any aspect of GOP politics under the Bush Administration, and like a fractal image you will see it is constructed of an infinite number of “us versus them” conflicts, forming a larger whole.
Foreign policy? Us versus Islamofascists. Domestic Policy? Us versus Socialists. Economic policy? Us versus Regulators. Environmental policy? Us versus harmoniously exploiting nature. Gun policy? Us versus the myth of gun control.
Absolutely everything in the modern GOP can be broken down into us versus them. No matter how large the overarching conflict is, no matter how small the individual battles are, it’s always Us versus Them. Every time and without exception, it is Us versus Them.
That is why nothing will ever improve under the GOP. Nothing will ever improve because the conflict itself is the ultimate goal, not winning the conflict. Everything becomes an excuse to prolong the conflict, to find more conflict, to find new enemies to fight against, to find new ways to wage the battle. Iraq, Iran, and the War on Terror down to the politicization of the Justice Department down to the lunch menu at the Bureau of Land Management cafeteria, it’s always a new battle, a new fight, a new chance to prove you are with Us and against Them.
Never mind that Us always changes and Them always changes. What constitutes Us today on Issue A may put you squarely in the Them category on Issue B, and then you are The Enemy, to be hated, shunned, and fought against with every last breath of Us lest your evil reign victorious.
And should Them actually be winning? Simply redefine the fight and pick on a new Them. The old Them and the old fight against old Them wasn’t as important as the new Them, for they are The Greatest Threat To Us Since Hitler.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, without this vital piece of knowledge, nothing on Earth ever made any sense. Once you’ve caught on that the GOP is nothing more than the eternal application of Us versus Them, everything they do can be predicted, telegraphed, and dealt with.
Now, does Us versus Them show up elsewhere? Of course it does. We’re all guilty of it. But I’d like to think most of us don’t look at that level of constant, eternal conflict as the only possible worldview out there.
Obama? Obama has the Us part down. We’re all Us. We have to work together because we’re all in this together.
But this summer and fall there will be no larger threat to the free world of the GOP’s Us than Barack Obama. He will become the poster child, the visible face, the very essence of the GOP’s Them. The media will gladly go along with it, because after all, Us versus Them sells.
They are going to Them the hell out of the guy. Resisting the siren call of Us versus Them is difficult. Humanity has been fighting it with varying levels of success for thousands and thousands of years. But every now and then the world gets sick of Us versus Them and just becomes Us.
That’s what we have to do here in 2008. And to start, we have to recognize that Us versus Them merely leads to everyone becoming Them.
That’s the difference…between, well…us and them.
