Sore losers, racists and their alternate reality: a stem-winder.

(This one is for TClog, who apparently has been missing my rants)

I have the good fortune of not knowing many lunatic Republicans, and that’s saying something given how they seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days. Perhaps the ones I know are smart enough not to get me going, but I don’t think that’s true. Mostly I think it’s that New England has driven most of the lunatics out. There are certainly the libertarians holed up in the backwoods with their guns, and plenty of truly conservative people, but the apoplectic crowd that dominates the political news these days is largely absent.

But, even though I don’t have the chance to ‘converse’ with these fucking idiots very often, I read and see what they say. I’m aware of all their talk about ‘taking the country back’ and ‘not recognizing the country they grew up in’ and all their blather about big gubmint, out of control deficits, and the like. I’m here to say that, while their may be a teeny tiny kernel of actual belief buried deep in the dark heart of their statements, 99.99% of it can be attributed to sore-loserism and latent racism. And to avoid the inevitable loss of credibility by playing the race card, I’d say the racism part is the lesser of the two, but it’s not some fringe motivation that can be attributed to only the nuttiest of the nutty.

The easiest things to refute are their concerns about big gubmint and the deficit/debt, for you see, when their chosen leaders were in charge (Saint Ronny and W – they didn’t like HW because he raised taxes to fix the deficit) , both of those things grew at an amazing rate.

I may not need to remind you that W inherited a budget surplus, with the debt on track to be paid off (this as the result of a vibrant *tech-bubble* economy and some efforts by the Clinton administration to get things on a better course – partly taxes, partly pay-go, partly other stuff). They were so concerned about the ‘negative’ impact of the surplus that they thought we should return to a deficit and ultimately to an enormous national debt. They did this through three principle means: huge tax cuts for the wealthy ($1.6T worth – keep in mind the so-called stimulus bill was less than half of that), Medicare Part D (the prescription drugs for seniors bill – which they lied about the cost of to congress, and specifically forbid Medicare from negotiating drug prices) and ‘emergency’ funding for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (this despite the years and years they dragged on). I think you can make the case that some of this spending was for the right reasons, but nonetheless it exploded both the deficit and the debt. These are very fiscally responsible people….

They created a terrifying enhanced role for the government through large chunks of The Patriot Act (the very name of which cowed legislators into supporting a draconian surveillance state). Medicare Part D required an army of people to manage, and the number of ‘contractors’ toiling in our various wars and spy agencies is truly mind boggling. Those that claim to desire keeping the government out of their lives should have wanted nothing to do with any of this.

So, their concerns about big gubmint and ‘out of control’ deficits are rank hypocrisy and ultimately tied into them being sore losers. It’s not their guy running the government, so now all of a sudden they are deeply concerned about all of this. They’re liars. They don’t give an actual shit about those things, they only want to be running things again.

The racism charge is a bit trickier, because almost inevitably when you talk about racism people start imagining the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mobs. But racism is far more subtle and insidious than that. Recall from Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia (spring 2008) the story of his white grandmother crossing the street to avoid black people. This is racism. It’s an innate fear/unease of people different from you. You may not want them beaten or hung, but you don’t want them living near you, and you most certainly don’t want them ‘in charge’. Racists (perhaps xenophobe is the more accurate term – and no, not the Nintendo game, although clearly I showed some deep expertise on the subject) assume people different than them have different motivations than they do. Somehow the commonality of the human condition, the hopes and aspirations that they themselves feel, are more noble than those experienced by ‘the other’. ‘The other’ is always looking to take from you, is always looking for the easy way out, is always looking for a way to change the life you know and are comfortable with. ‘The other’ eats strange food, talks funny, etc. Of course, ‘the other’ is really just trying to get ahead, trying to make it so their children have a better chance than they did, pretty much aspiring to all the same things that everyone else is. But the racist/xenophobe sees the world in a very primitive zero-sum way. If someone else gets ahead, then they must be getting it from me (or people like me), as if there was only so much ‘ahead’ to go around.

The interesting thing is that most of ‘the other’ that they fear are poor people, but they attribute their stereotypes to ethnicity rather than economic circumstance. They miss the commonality among those at the bottom – that they are poor and have very few opportunities. They also have no where to go but up, and since the xenophobe thinks there is only so much up, they feel threatened.

But the racism moves to a different level when it comes to Obama (though this mostly affects the fringiest), for he is as much like ‘us’ as he is like ‘them’. He and his family resemble everything that white middle-America strives for, but they’re black. Church going (more actual church attendance than W), lovely well-mannered children, a dog, well-spoken, well-dressed, well….pretty much everything America claims to want you to be. Just by being black (and maybe having a funny name) they somehow have nefarious intentions, particularly as it involves changing things that have served white people. It seems fairly clear to me that he’s a champion of reducing inequality and the simple fact is that non-whites are disproportionately worse off than whites may make it appear that there is some sort of favoritism. But the fear is bereft of facts and amplified by the latent racism.

And through it all the country is mired in an economic catastrophe, and nothing amplifies people’s innate fears like the stress that comes with not knowing how things are going to turn out. I’d bet money that there was a spike in racist sentiment during the Great Depression, for none of these fears are new or novel.

So when your asshole neighbor or coworker complains about how Obama is a socialist and that things were better before, tell him/her to suck it (arguing actual facts with assholes gets you nowhere).