Specifically, I'm speaking about the Obama administration's purported efforts to reform American health care. This is one of those subjects that, as a Canadian basking in the warm glow of a single-payer system, probably shouldn't concern me. But given the subject's dominance of the cable news cycle and the blogosphere, it's been impossible to avoid. And if I'm interested in American politics partially because it's so much more out there than Canadian politics, then this summer has been a stark lesson in both the ironclad grip of corporate lobbyists over the political process south of the border, and the maddening gullibility and stupidity of a large portion of that country's white working class.
Although I wasn't alive in 1967 to experience the Summer of Love, I've now had the misfortune to bear witness to 2009 devolving into the Summer of Hate. When the teabaggers and right-wing extremists first burst onto the national consciousness at the town hall debates, the sheer madness and idiocy of what they were saying stunned me into silence. Never before in my life had I seen so much misdirected anger as when these sad rubes let loose their redfaced rage at the prospect of receiving HEALTH CARE. Bush's wars of aggression, shredding of the Constitution and civil liberties, disregard for looming ecological catastrophe and undeclared class war against poor and working-class Americans all passed them by, but Fox News and hate radio have given them their marching orders: all the accumulated disasters facing the country as a result of eight years of Republican mismanagement (and, more to the point, 30 years of neoliberal economic dogma) have now been placed solely at the feet of one Barack Hussein Obama. Sadly, the town hall rubes are more than racist enough to fully embrace this logic.
Let's not kid ourselves: a good deal of the fears generated among misinformed white working class Americans by the right wing noise machine are based primarily on race. Tim Wise summed up best the reasons for their ludicrous belief that Obama, as total a Wall Street whore as has ever occupied the Oval Office, whose entire health care "plan" is based around salvaging the existing private insurance system, is secretly attempting to impose communism on America:
It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing--his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.Of course, Obama has made it much harder for progressives to defend him, given his propensity for spitting in the face of his most loyal supporters. His health care bill is to the health insurance industry what TARP was to Wall Street - a government bailout in which taxpayers subsidize private industry. The great Matt Taibbi explained in his recent Rolling Stone article on health care why the bill that ultimately emerges may actually be worse than no bill at all, since it essentially forces the population to buy a defective product. This is classic Obama - he has always offered pretty words while his actual policies have constituted the grossest kind of corporate welfare.
To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites--which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below--Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.
And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:
"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."
In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.
Nevertheless, the sheer level of venom directed at him by the extreme right is profoundly depressing because it fails to address any substantial, real problems with the bill. Rather, the lies, distortions and exaggerations peddled nonstop by Republican politicians and the right wing hate machine have raised ridiculous fears of "death panels" and pulling the plug on grandma. It's just really, really sad to see people again loudly protesting against their own best interests, because if they should be protesting anything, it's that the Obama plans don't go nearly far enough towards universal health care. But that would require a knowledgable, informed citizenry - impossible in the modern United States given the predominance of corporate disinformation campaigns that pass as "news".
I want to end this somewhat disjointed post by referring to two vastly different books I recently read as part of my ongoing attempt to understand conservative redneck culture, to figure out once and for all why these people consistently vote against their own best interests. The first book is a truly worthwhile read by Winchester, Virginia native Joe Bageant called Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. Bageant is a product of a culture saturated with God and guns, yet through education and 60s-era hippie liberalism managed to emerge a self-proclaimed "godless socialist", earning him mad props from yours truly. His book is a sad indictment of the South in which a toxic combination of religiosity, poor education and an otherwise commendable commitment to "self-reliance" has resulted in a population snugly in the hands of an ingenious Republican public relations machine. Conservatives' success in framing national issues through Southern cultural tropes is truly impressive in its diabolical success, and the only hope for liberals and progressives is to grab the bull by the horns and create new frames by which progressive policies can find a hold in these reactionary strongholds. This will be extraordinarily difficult given the utter corruption (via corporate campaign contributions) of the current Democratic Party.
The second book has value only in that its pages can be burned as a fuel source if necessary. Michael Savage is perhaps the most repugnant talk radio host in America, no easy feat in a field dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I recently perused his book The Savage Nation, and was predictably mortified by its scathing hatred towards Savage's imagined shadowy force of secular, gay-loving, America-hating liberal "Commu-Nazis". Reading this latest version, published in 2002, it was clear that the equation of Obama to Hitler by conservatives is by no means a recent phenomenon. But I gained some insight into the uniquely twisted reasoning of deluded white conservatives towards Obama and his apparently sinister aims. It goes something like this:
Throughout his book, Savage, like many conservative commentators, explicitly equates liberals with socialists, communists, Nazis and terrorists. Despite Obama's excruciatingly middle-of-the-road, mealy-mouthed centrism and fellating of Wall Street and the Washington establishment, right-wing media has successfully mined his record for anything that could conceivably be used to fit him into a convenient "angry black man" stereotype. The widespread coverage of Jeremiah Wright, magnification of Obama's relationship to William Ayers, and subsequent demonizing of Van Jones as a radical communist revolutionary all combined to create a Bizarro world version of Obama specifically designed to stoke fear among backwards conservative voters - a dichotomy best captured in this article by The Onion.
So the longstanding conservative equation of liberals with terrorists, combined with the exotic "otherness" of Obama's personal background (white mother, black Kenyan father) and his suspiciously Muslim-sounding middle name, Hussein, all conspire to create a version of Obama onto which any manner of conservative fears can be projected - socialism, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, you name it. The teabaggers, birthers and deathers all seem to truly believe Obama is some Manchurian candidate who will soon reveal his true nature as a communist/socialist/fascist/Muslim racist. That these ideas often contradict each other is no problem for far-right propagandists and true believers.
The fact that conservatives will demonize Obama no matter what he does makes his willingness to reach out to Republican politicians in a futile effort at "bipartisanship" that much more frustrating. In fact, the Democrats' approach to health care has been so undeniably weak that it's fair game to assume that that was their plan from the beginning. The always-excellent David Michael Green said as much in today's must-read column:
Of course, he's also chosen to put healthcare reform on the table as the signature legislative initiative probably of his entire presidency. That's fine, but watching him in action I sometimes wonder if this clown really and actually wants a second term. I mean, if you had asked me in January, "How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?", I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.Trust me, if Obama was actually the Islamic Marxist revolutionary racist of Glenn Beck's psychotic delusions, he'd be a lot more effective at actually getting things done.Altogether, it's an astonishingly perfect recipe for getting rolled, so much so that I'm not the first person to have wondered out loud if that was actually the president's intention all along. Look at this freaking fool. Now look at the guy who ran a letter-perfect, disciplined, textbook, insurgent, victorious campaign for the White House. Can they possibly be the same person? And, since they obviously are, is there possibly another explanation for this disaster besides an intentional boot? I dunno. But what I do know is this. Obama's very best-case scenario for healthcare legislation right now represents a ton of lost votes in 2010 and 2012. And the worse that scenario gets, the worse he and his party do. But even a 'success' in the months ahead will produce a tepid bill, a mistrustful public, an inflamed and unanswered radical right, and a mealy-mouthed new government program that doesn't even begin to go online until 2013. A real vote-getter that, eh?
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