Hysteria and Demographics

In recent days, two columnists in the New York Times have made the point that demographics is behind the rage, the hysteria, the lunacy of the right-wing. I see it, too. It's in the racial slurs yelled by tea-baggers. It's in the "birthers," who refuse to admit that a black man is legitimately president. It's in Republicans who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, a socialist, a terrorist, a communist, an "Arab," even the Anti-Christ. It's in the frenzy about illegal immigrants.

Here's Charles M. Blow:

The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.

The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.

It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

There's clearly more to this frenzy than politics. It's fear that drives these people, fear of minorities, fear of becoming a minority in America, fear that their mythical Ozzie & Harriet version of America is gone for good. Fox News and other Republican leaders have been pushing this fear for years. Well, it helped them take the South, and it's given them a formidable base. And these days, they have nothing to offer America but fear. For any political problem, they just naturally reach for fear. It's become a habit, as well as a necessity.

And the people they're targeting, white conservative Christians, often elderly and poorly educated, are terrified that they won't be able to compete in the modern world. Like fearful people everywhere, they look for a scapegoat,... and the GOP is happy to oblige. But will it work over the long-term?

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

Frank Rich makes much the same point. He compares the hysteria these days with what followed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation. There was opposition to Social Security in 1935 and to Medicare in 1965, but it was nothing like what resulted from giving black people civil rights.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

America has moved on since then. We're a much different country these days. But there are a lot of people who are still unhappy that white men aren't automatically on top anymore. And this economic collapse (ironically, brought to us by right-wing Republicans, not liberal Democrats) is making them even more frightened and insecure. It's not the rather conservative health care reform bill that's got so many people going off the rails, nor the way it passed Congress by majority vote of our elected representatives. This hysteria has deeper reasons.

But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

In the long-run, they can't win. We are a diverse country these days, and becoming more diverse all the time. Women are solidly in the workforce now, and in fact, they're becoming better educated than men. Blacks and Hispanics won't go back to segregation and blatant discrimination. Gays and lesbians are out of the closet. Even atheists like me are becoming more outspoken and assertive. This is our country too!

So, in the long-run, they can't win. But in the short-run, they can do a lot of damage.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.