I never intended to write any diaries about politics here, since there are already enough of those. I wanted to limit myself to the topic of education. But I had to make an exception today.
I've had this theory for some time that the question of "whether the Tea Party is racist" is both misdirected and misunderstood. Of course there are racists in the Tea Party; there are racists everywhere. Moreover, the emergence of the Tea Party in the wake of Barack Obama's election has given racists a forum and an outlet for very public racist expression the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. I've always believed, though, that when it comes to the Tea Party as a whole race is, metaphorically speaking, seasoning for the hate stew. It's not the only source of their uglier rhetoric, nor their apparent willingness and/or desire to believe provably untrue nonsense. It validates their beliefs and feelings, but doesn't in all cases inform them.
The fact is they would have hated any Democratic president regardless of race, and subjected us to the same volume and degree of rhetorical awfulness, albeit of a different nature, if we had a white Democrat in the White House. They wouldn't, for example, be "questioning" and demanding "proof" of the birthplace of a white Democrat named Dave Smith, or even a black Democrat named Dave Smith, but neither would they do so for a black Republican named Raheem Mustafa Abdul-Rauf. In short, it's not racism so much as it is "Democrat-ism." The latter comes first; the former follows.
The Tea Party, by and large, hates President Obama, first and foremost, because he's a Democrat. A lot of them also hate him because he's black. They'd still hate him if he was white, but they wouldn't hate him if he was a Republican. Since the mid-1990s, and particularly since 9/11, Republican voters, constituencies, fans, supporters and enablers have been programmed to hate Democrats, Democratic constituencies, "liberals," "the Left," and anyone else who doesn't swallow the Fox News/talk radio/Cato/Heritage/AFP propaganda narrative whole. Ask any right-winger or Tea Party member what they think of Democrats, liberals, progressives, and so on. Listen to Michael Savage for an hour, or just look at the titles of Ann Coulter's books. Hey, just read the Saturday Hate Mail-a-Palooza here on Daily Kos.
It's not just that this animus toward Democrats, "Liberals," "the Left," etc. is grotesquely out of proportion to anything any actual Democrat or liberal has ever actually done, said, proposed, thought, believed or wanted. And I absolutely do not mean to trivialize or dismiss the element of racism in the Tea Party and the right-wing cohort at large. It seems to me, though, that we've reached the point where, in the eyes of many GOP fans/supporters/enablers, "Liberals," as such, whomever they may be perceived to be, have actually become not a political cohort, but ... a race.
Over the last few days I've tried to have a civil back-and-forth with a really awful troll over at HuffPo, who kept insisting that "Liberals" depicting George W. Bush as a chimp is just as, if not more, racist as that California woman's depicting Barack Obama and his parents as chimps. (I'm sure a lot of us have had these conversations.) I tried to ignore his nastier remarks and concentrate on the logic, that a white person depicting another white person as a chimp is not racist, whereas a white person depicting a black person as a chimp probably is. Naturally, he kept insisting that this was a "double standard."
Long story short, the last thing he came up with, entirely unprompted, was the idea that the depiction was not meant to depict black people as chimps, but to depict liberals as chimps. The rationale included something about Obama's mother being white; needless to say it made little sense. But the following remarks really floored me:
But comparing "liberals" to a lesser evolved species, well, that's just kind of reality. As long as "liberals" are obsessed by race and controlling their fellow man, we'll consider them to be less evolved.
Whoa.
Apart from being one of the most ignorant and offensive things anyone has ever said to me, this is precisely the sort of thing that a racist would say.
I think this goes a little beyond the garden-variety right-wing argument about racism, with which we're all basically familiar. This is essentially a declaration that "Liberals" are not just people with certain values and policy preferences which differ from those held by Republican voters, but an actual, whole race of people, and not only that, an inferior race. A "less evolved species."
This impromptu and unsolicited comment by a Tea Party troll, I think, supports my theory that a lot of the "racism" inherent in the TP cohort is directed primarily against Democrats and "liberals," to the extent that they think of Democrats and "liberals" as a race. The behavior, the rhetoric, and the thinking that those words and actions reveal, matches all of the characteristics of racist behavior, racist rhetoric and racist thinking, except that the "race" at the center of it is not ethnic, but political.
It's the psychology of racism, in practically every respect, except that it's manifested against not a particular race or ethnic group, but against a political cohort, a group that is, importantly, much, much harder to define and identify. Put simply, it's a lot easier to identify that a stranger is African-American than that he is a "liberal," or even a Democrat. It makes those blanket statements about what "liberals" believe, think and want that much more problematic (apart from the fact that what GOP fans are required to think that liberals believe, think and want are not actually true of any real person, let alone any real liberal). But that aspect of it is beside the point.
The ugliness of right-wingers' and the Tea Party's more egregious rhetorical excesses starts to make a lot more sense if you think of them in terms that regard, from their point of view, Democrats and "liberals" as a race.