Pat Buchanan is the unrepentant voice of the White Racial Id in the Age of Obama...he is so the trend setter and barometer for the Tea Party GOP on issues of race and white racial resentment. For that, I am grateful. Uncle Pat makes doing recon on his team oh so easy, as they hide their wicked pathologies in plain sight.
Last week Pat Buchanan blessed the public with two articles. The first was a great example of poo poo slinging Right-wing head cheese that included almost every talking point from the Right-wing in the Age of Obama. White racial resentment, symbolic racism, white rage, anti-affirmative action, Obama as anti-white, white victimology, yada yada was all there: Thus, I deem "The View from Martha's Vineyard" utterly brilliant.
The equivalent to Buchanan's screed would be having sex with a 18 year old teenager who read one of Ann Hooper's sex guides and had no practical field experience with the yoni: He knew all the points to hit; but the young Lothario lacked technique---groping and heated penetration that was frustrating to the degree that it titillated. But it was mighty enthusiastic!
Pat Buchanan doubled down with his follow up piece, "Obama's Race Based Spoils System."
This is the money shot my friends. One of the old school/new school white angst memes of recent note is that President Barack Obama administers a spoils system for racial minorities. He supposedly hates white people. As a result of his anti-white zeal, Obama has set up a system of institutional "affirmative action" to hand down goodies to the colored folk, goodies which are to the exclusion of hard working white men.
In its most crude White nationalist reading, the time of the Great Recession and Right wing austerity policies will lead to "black uprisings" as the Fed's budget is cut. In Uncle Pat's more sophisticated narrative, the story of "black and brown equals government employees," is a naked dog whistle that the U.S. budget should just be cut because it employs lazy "colored folks" to the disadvantage of "hard working," "real American" whites.
This is the 21st century version of Bacon's Rebellion folks. White elites have long known that they can motivate racially resentful white folks to act against their own class interests through appeals to the psychic wages of white supremacy and white privilege. Moreover, the feigned color blind policies of Conservatism do this work through the language of "small government" and "constitutionalism," what are ultimately ways of talking nasty about black and brown folks without sounding racist.
Conservative wunderkind Lee Atwater said it best and most honestly with his famous quip that:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “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.”
But here is my question. Is this new/old narrative of kill the federal government because it employs too many "darkies" just a system artifact, i.e. it exists in the political subconscious of Whiteness and Conservatism and can thus be harnessed without having to use the actual language of race?
Or is the "federal government equals employment for undeserving blacks and minorities" (and others, here meaning you lazy teachers and union members) a top down talking point, where opinion leaders like Buchanan, Fox News, and the Tea Party GOP's leadership filter it gravity-like in a daily message to the foot soldiers of the Right, who then reproduce and disseminate it broadly?
