Take Back America?

(drawing by Barry Blitt, New York Times)

In his New York Times column, Frank Rich puts Arizona's hysteria over illegal immigration into larger context:

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

The hysteria over brown people entering our country is not new, but it's been growing. (And it is hysteria, despite very real concerns about border security.) Here in Nebraska, anti-immigrant fervor is common. Illegal immigrants are the scapegoat for every problem. Unemployed? That's because those illegal immigrants are taking all the jobs. Concerned about government spending? That's due to all those illegal immigrants on welfare, since none of them want to work for a living. Oh, yeah, and they're stealing your Social Security, too. (Funny, huh?)

Some concern is reasonable, of course. Beef-packing plants in Nebraska used to pay well. Then corporations learned that they could break the unions and drastically cut pay by hiring immigrants along the Mexican border (with no concern about whether they were legal immigrants or not). A huge influx of poor Hispanics kept wages down, while posing expensive problems to the local school system and other government services.

But anger was often misdirected at the immigrants themselves, poor people who just wanted a job. A lot of that was bigotry, too. It's easy to whip up hysteria in a situation like this. Heck, there were riots when Irish Catholics - some of them my own ancestors - started arriving in America in large numbers a century and a half ago. And they were white. In small-town America, different means scary. And when times are bad, fear turns into anger very quickly.

Hispanics are the fastest-growing group in America, and that frightens many non-Hispanic whites who've already been unsettled by the huge advances in civil rights in this country. When I was a kid, white men were on top. There was absolutely no question about that. And generally speaking, they still are. But it's not automatic these days. Now, women are becoming better educated than men. And that difference is starting to show up in job opportunities.

And minorities are much more visible now - and not nearly as willing to sit in the back of the bus. White births are supposed to become a minority in America any day now. And even the president is a black man. Is there any wonder we see this "Take Back America" hysteria now?

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

Illegal immigration is not new. It's not a sudden crisis. But it's coming to a head this year for the same reason that we're seeing Tea Parties and "birthers." The symbolism of a black man in the White House has created an explosion of fear and bigotry in a certain segment of white America. After all, he'll be favoring "his people," right? (Right,... if by "his people" you mean Americans.) And since Glenn Beck tells us that Obama - the loving son of a white woman - is a racist, with a "deep-seated hatred for white people," who knows what he might do to us?

Republicans from Fox "News" on down have been exploiting this fearful bigotry for political purposes. But admittedly, they've also got a tiger by the tail. Republicans have been pushing racism since at least 1964, when they saw the opportunity to wrestle the South from the Democratic Party (the South being the most solidly Democratic part of the country before the Democrats got behind civil rights legislation). Pandering to racists was just good politics, and it let the Republican Party dominate at the federal level for decades.

Note that this was recently admitted by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. To the dismay of many party leaders, he admitted that the "Southern Strategy" had been the focus of the GOP "for the past 40-plus years." Is it any wonder that the Republican Party has so few minority members, when they've been deliberately pandering to bigots for the past four decades?

Thinking that this made good political sense, Republican leaders have been wooing the most fearful, the most ignorant, the most bigoted segment of America for decades. Pushing fear was wildly successful at motivating the base, so that's what they did - and continue to do. Racists, gun-toting militiamen, religious fanatics, far-right extremists - all these were valuable to the GOP because they were dedicated, motivated foot-soldiers. And because they would let wealthy corporate interests do whatever they wanted, as long as party leaders paid lip service to their culture war issues.

But suddenly, the tail started wagging the dog. By pandering to extremists, Republicans started driving away moderates. This made the rest of the party even more extreme, which drove away more moderates. Pretty soon, the Republican base started seeing moderate conservatives as traitors to the cause. And now, even long-time conservative leaders are running scared. These days, you can't ever be too extreme in the GOP. The only sin is moderation, and compromise with Democrats is appeasement. No Republican has the guts to stand up to the lunatic wing of their own party, because the lunatic wing is the party these days. It's all that's left.

Outbreaks of nativist apoplexy are nothing new in American history. The last derailed George W. Bush’s apparently earnest effort to get a bipartisan immigration compromise through the Senate in 2007. At the time, the more egregious expressions of anti-immigrant rage — including Arizona’s self-appointed border-patrol militia, the Minutemen — were stigmatized as a fringe by the White House and much of the G.O.P. establishment. John McCain, though facing a tough fight for the Republican presidential nomination, signed on to the Bush reform effort despite being slimed by those in his party’s base who accused him of supporting “amnesty.”

What a difference the Tea Party makes. This time McCain endorsed his state’s new immigration law as “a good tool” and “a very important step forward,” and propagandized in favor of it with his widely ridiculed televised canard that illegal immigrants were “intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.” McCain, like other mainstream conservative Republicans facing primaries this year, is now fighting for his political life against a Tea Party-supported radical. His opponent, the former congressman and radio shock jock J. D. Hayworth, is an unabashed birther who frames the immigration debate as an opportunity to “stand up for our culture,” presumably against all immigrants, legal and illegal alike. In this political climate, he could well win.

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn’t be singled out for censure: He is far from alone in cowering before his party’s extremists. Neither Mitch McConnell, John Boehner nor Eric Cantor dared say a word against Arizona’s law. Mitt Romney, who was mocked during the 2008 campaign for having employed undocumented Guatemalan immigrants as landscapers on his Massachusetts estate, tried to deflect the issue by vacillating (as usual). So did Mike Huckabee, who told The Dallas Morning News last week that “it’s not my place to agree or disagree” with what happened in Arizona. If it’s not the place of a talk-show host and prospective presidential candidate to take a stand on an issue of this moment, whose place is it? There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

I can't feel sorry for the GOP, though I can - and I am - frightened at what they might again do to my country. (Wasn't eight years of unmitigated disaster enough?) In the 1960's, the Democratic Party made the principled decision to support civil rights for blacks, despite knowing that it would destroy the party in the South. They knew that this would be a political disaster, that they'd lose the most solidly Democratic part of our country, but they did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do. Democrats have never been perfect, but this was truly admirable.

And Republicans were gleeful. They, too, knew what this would do to the Democrats in the South, and they cynically proposed to make the most of it by wooing southern white racists themselves. And so they have. Because of this, America has suffered a great deal under conservative political control. But Republicans are starting to see this bite them on the ass. Minorities are becoming a larger and larger proportion of the American electorate. And most whites aren't racists these days, either. Pushing fear might work pretty well with the elderly, but young people are somewhat resistant (not entirely immune, unfortunately).

Now the Democrats have elected a black president, and the bigots are panicking. Republicans are terrified of the demographics on this, and as usual, they're willing to go to any lengths for their political ambition (unfortunately, they've got Fox "News" behind them these days, pushing every lie as hard as they can). White bigots are suddenly hysterical, and this is coming out in the Tea Party movement.

These days, blatant racism is no longer acceptable in polite - "politically correct" - society. As a white man, I regularly hear racist comments, but people invariably lower their voices first. And most of these people will indignantly deny that they're racist. Few people will admit even to themselves that they're racist, and very few will admit this in public. Yes, our country has changed that much. But attitudes don't change overnight, and it's very, very easy to fear people who are different. That's just human nature.

In the Tea Party, that fear is largely redirected - often deliberately - into economic terms, but it is still based in bigotry. It's no coincidence that we have tea-baggers now, but not while Bush was in office. Yes, partly that's because Bush was a right-wing Republican, too, and current tea-baggers are the same people who put him in office and supported every lunatic policy the Republicans came up with. But it's also because Bush was white. You really can't get around that.

It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

Ah, yes, it's white men who really face discrimination in America. You can't imagine how many times I've heard that. It would be hilarious if it weren't so embarrassing. These days, white men have to compete with minorities and with women. Tough! It's not their fathers' America. (In fact, it's a far better America, as most of us realize.) If the boss hires his nephew or his neighbor's kid - both white, of course - no one thinks anything of it. But if he hires a black man, a Hispanic, or - for many jobs - a woman, then they must have gotten the job only because they're a minority. Clearly, the whole thing was rigged!

Likewise, Barack Obama's election must have been rigged - by ACORN or some Jewish cabal - right? And he's not a "real" American anyway. (The proof? He doesn't look anything like us.)  It must all be a plot. He must really be a Muslim, a terrorist, a Communist, a socialist, a Nazi,...  Again, this should be funny. Anyone less like the "angry black man" stereotype would be hard to find. (Ah, but that just means that he's elitist, right?)  And how is Obama the Nazi when it's the Republicans torturing prisoners and making one segment of the population carry identification cards proving that - for now, at least - they're legal?

The GOP, pushed to the extremes by its own far-right base, lost the election in 2008 after eight disastrous years when Republicans controlled the White House (six years of which they firmly controlled all three branches of the federal government). It's funny, because for eight long years, I wanted to "take back America," myself. I was desperate to rescue our country from those far-right ideologues willing to wage war on an innocent country - on credit, no less - if it would advance their political goals.

I wanted to stop the wealthy from treating our Treasury as their own little piggy bank. I wanted to "take back America" from the religious nuts who consider Thomas Jefferson to be un-American, from the timid little cowards willing to let a demagogue torture prisoners of war, from the creationists and the global warming deniers and everyone else who refuse to accept evidence from careful scientific research if it conflicts with their fantasies.

But I assure you, I'll fight long and hard against letting the bigots "take back America" now. We got rid of slavery, we got rid of official segregation, we gave women and minorities and poor people the vote. We regulated the banks. We worked to protect the environment. We created a social safety net - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and now health insurance reform. This is my America, and you fearful little bigots can't have it back!