As a rule, I do not believe anything I read in the U.K. Telegraph because I consider it the least reliable “mainstream” paper in the English language. Less reliable even than the Washington Times. The Telegraph is often a witting conduit of misinformation. So, I can’t say that I automatically believe that a Romney adviser told one of their reporters that our president doesn’t understand our shared Anglo-Saxon heritage with Britain. In my experience, the disinformation disseminated by the Telegraph has uniformly been in the service of helping the Republican Party and their war efforts, but their standards are so low that I can’t dismiss the possibility that they’ve timed this article to Romney’s arrival in England in order to sell papers.
However, it’s quite possible that a Romney adviser actually did say this about the president. In that case, it’s a concern because that kind of language hearkens back to the rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan. The following is an excerpt from a 1964 KKK leaflet that was created in 1964 shortly before the murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney.
We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tarters, Orientals, Negroes, nor any other person whose native background of culture is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon system of Government by responsible, FREE individual citizens.
Our governmental system is a Constitutional Republic, primarily designed to protect the Responsible, Individual Citizens from all tyranny: which selects its representatives by both the direct and the indirect Democratic process; and recognizes the necessity for the existence of an effective Loyal Opposition to any current Administration. This type of Governmental System is unique, and found only where Anglo-Saxons control the Governmental Machinery of a Nation. With rare exceptions, people of other backgrounds simply cannot comprehend the Anglo-Saxon principle of “Equal Justice under Law” and the fact that EVERY “Right” must be balanced by an accompanying Responsibility. The inherent balance and reason of this system has little or no attraction for these persons of alien culture. The generally prefer to shirk Individual Responsibility, grab up as much material wealth as they can, and accept Centralized Authority and Dictatorship, in the hope that they can buy special favors and privileges for themselves.
The conflict between these two attitudes has now become a Life and Death matter in America. The people of the non-American cultures CAN and COULD live under the Anglo-Saxon System, but they prefer to see it destroyed. The true American Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, CAN NOT live under a Dictatorship!
This issue is clearly one of personal physical SELF-DEFENSE or DEATH for the American Anglo Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons have no choice but to defend our Constitutional Republic by every means at their command, because it is, LITERALLY, their LIFE. They will die without it.
If you are a Christian, American Anglo-Saxon who can understand the simple Truth of this Philosophy, you belong in the White Knights of the KU KLUX KLAN of Mississippi. We need your help right away. Get your Bible out and PRAY! You will hear from us.
That rhetoric is already disturbingly familiar to anyone who listens closely to the modern Republican Party’s rhetoric about taxes and entitlements and social welfare. The constant questioning of the president’s birth certificate makes more sense when you see the lineage of those types of arguments. After reading the leaflet above, how do John Sununu’s comments sound to you?
“[The president] has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago.”
Romney followed that up by saying that the president’s policies are “extraordinarily foreign.” And now we have an adviser who is purported to have said that Obama doesn’t understand Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Lee Atwater was a cutthroat political operative who helped get Poppy Bush elected to the presidency. In 1981, he explained the evolution of race-based politics in an interview with Alexander Lamis:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.””
To a certain degree, this describes the political phenomenon known as the dog whistle. A dog whistle emits a sound that dogs can hear but humans cannot. An abstract racial message involves a sound that a Klan member can hear but that most people think is innocuous. When you start talking about our Anglo-Saxon heritage and the black president’s inability to understand it, you are echoing the Klan’s rhetoric.
There should be a very heavy price to pay for talking that way. But the very nature of the dog whistle makes it hard to hold people accountable. There’s always a less damaging explanation. There’s always a large subset of people who simply don’t hear what you’ve just plainly said.
