At the end of August, I published my first diary, an excerpt from my thesis on the Obama-era Hysterical Right. I'd been a lurker for a few years, and spent a lot of time here during the 2012 election cycle. The diary went from rescued to the rec list over the course of one day, beyond my expectations, and I had some great discussions in the comments. Not bad for a first diary.
So now, three months later, I'm back with another excerpt. This is the polemic I allowed myself (my supervisor kept me from going there in the body of the work) as the ultimate conclusion of the thesis. This is the assessment of a Canadian hooked on (and immersed in, for my research) U.S. politics for five years. I think it's becoming even more relevant now, as Republican shenanigans seem to be heading towards critical mass. Follow me past the orange thing people enjoy thinking up names for, to read the unchained polemic of an academic who just wanted to get the bloody thesis done. Please be nice (or nice-ish).
EDIT: This was written in April of this year, before the shutdown, the rollout of Obamacare, the nuclear option, Christie's re-election, and so on.
This is the last stand of the South in a Civil War grudge re-match that we have seen in earlier eras—but this time, it’s for keeps. Whichever side prevails will claim the ultimate prize of the American self, which has been elusive for as long as America’s original sin of slavery has remained unreconciled. Thinking back through American history, we see recurring cycles of culture wars; even as these might appear primarily political and/or social in nature, culture remains at the very heart these conflicts. The issue is that the American self necessarily requires an other. It is a nation born of conflict fought and resolved, and so it is understandable that new social or political or cultural problems that might arise over time suggest the need for similar resolution through the inflation of conflict followed by a battle. We think immediately of the Civil War, and this is by far the most extreme example, but we must also consider other perpetual conflicts that aim to solve social problems through the wielding of power rather than reasoned debate, among them reproductive rights (including violence against abortion providers and clinics), gun safety (where the gun lobby successfully trumped the will of 90% of the American public who supported universal background checks), the role of the welfare state and the social safety net (which Republicans and pseudo-libertarian Ayn Rand devotees such as Paul Ryan and Rand Paul seek to eliminate), and fiscal policy (where the ‘1%’ still call the shots). Now governance itself seems to have been abdicated and left to the devices of partisan sniping and obstruction. The Republicans have been behaving like petulant children ever since Obama won.
We can raise our academic hackles and, as we have been trained, look for that hopefully unique and fascinating post-whateverist ‘so much more to it’ cachet that we can conceptualize, slap a catchy name on, and then show off in our papers. (And I have indeed done just this, just now.) But we also have to be willing to establish an honest and unfettered intellectual clearing in which we can just call things as they are, the tone and tenor of our emphases supplanting the standard academese we string together.
So let me say it another way: the Republicans, and the social conservatism they embody, are the impediments to progress whose agency has become so outsized that it often seems as though this minority of the American body politic can assert its will—that of the ‘real’ America—over that of the true America, and bring everyone else down with them in the process. But social conservatism is by its very nature untenable, for even as it rams a cudgel into the engine of social progress, it is ultimately incapable of countering social phenomena such as the sociopolitical calculus resulting from the momentum of changing demographics that reflect a growing rejection of, and open disdain for, regressivism. Society marches on, regardless of what the Tea Party wants. Just as Paul Ryan said: Republicans weren’t counting on the “urban” vote turning out as it did. And their attempts at minority voter disenfranchisement through voter identification laws—fundamental violences upon democracy—didn’t work, either. Nothing seemed to work this time around, not even good ol’ time Jim Crow poll shenanigans updated for the twenty-first century.
And now they are beside themselves trying to figure out what to do next. Who will be their saviour in 2016? Or will they need a sacrificial lamb if Hillary Clinton decides to run? The buzz around New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as a new hope faded dramatically in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, when, purely in the humanitarian interest of his constituents, he worked alongside Barack Obama in mutual cooperation between levels of government, each evincing leadership and a respect for each other in spite of ideological differences. Christie’s 2013 CPAC invitation didn’t get lost in the mail. He was banished for deigning to associate with the black president during a natural disaster. They invited Donald Trump instead.
All the while, the Republicans maintain their grip on Congress, killing measures such as gun safety legislation, pointlessly delaying cabinet confirmation hearings, or using the filibuster in the Senate to prevent mere up-or-down votes on any legislation that might remotely make Barack Obama look good. Allowing Obama to win on the larger conflict that underlies the issues would mean a de facto resignation of the white political privilege that formed the foundation of America. Such a submission would be the ultimate American role reversal as its original sin is confronted once and for all, with stalemate not an option. The mythologized embodiment of Christian whiteness that for centuries signified the ‘real’ America would recede further into the realm of myth, replaced by a growing diversity and progressivism that in a sense rejects this American mythos, since it operates in—and celebrates—the reality of contemporary life, rather than the realishness of that vaguely familiar yet indefinable era (because it never existed) that the Tea Party so desperately wants to return to. It’s not so much a fear of accepting the apparent ‘loss’ of their country as it is the terrifying realization that it is not theirs alone to claim, much less take back on their own terms.
This crisis is therefore about culture and power, and throughout U.S. history these have been unequivocally linked under the aegis of white privilege. In the absence of such unshakable monolithic agency, though, who claims control? Whose face will be chosen to face the world as embodying the totality and meaning of America and all that this ongoing project, begun by the Founders, promises? This is of utmost national importance and meaning. In 2008, Americans chose a black man as this embodiment, and this was just too much for vast swaths of the body politic, especially the social conservatives (regardless of region) belonging to a Southernized political party. The only possible reaction was hysteria, perhaps at the very root of which was the hard-wired primal survival mechanism that identifies the threat of the Other and reacts spontaneously and often violently. Our contemporary society of digital communications technologies has allowed for the global broadcast of this primal scream. And then in 2012, Americans chose to keep this black man, a bit more wrinkled, his hair greying, as their collective national avatar in a clear, decisive, and direct victory over those who sought nothing less than his destruction.
“We, the People” has been unshackled from what it has traditionally meant. “We, the People” now represents a once unthinkable coalition of diverse peoples and cultures, with a prevailing (if not necessarily uniform) ethos that has evolved past mere tolerance. Tolerance is neither acceptance nor understanding. Tolerance maintains a power dynamic in which the more privileged group tolerates the lesser. Acceptance and understanding only burgeon once communication enters the dynamic as a means to not only bridge gaps and discover each other, but move toward mutual celebration of the diversities of all, with the ultimate common goal of shared progress. This is why I always maintain that the internet changed everything in terms of social progress, for within a very compressed period of time, we became suddenly and fantastically joined together in a true global village in which communication fosters good will and progress among peoples. “We, the People” of America can now self-determine and self-identify themselves, no longer bound by the rigid traditions, conventions, sentiments, resentments, and conflicts of the past.
But so many in America—that constituency of rage—just aren’t ready to go there yet. And it took a black man, a devoted follower of Lincoln, to show this to America and to the world.