A mean streak in the US mainstreamMary Dejevsky, The Independent: When we Europeans -- the British included -- contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States?... It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea...
The point is that, when on 'normal,' the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others... There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation... Underlying the culture of cruelty... was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice...
The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment... that promotes a 'symbiosis of suffering and spectacle.'
Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weller, The Washington Post: Americans' views of political issues and their partisan attachments are being increasingly shaped by gut-level worldviews. On one side of many issues are those who see the world in terms of hierarchy, think about problems in black and white terms, and struggle to tolerate difference. On the other are those who favor independence over hierarchy, shades of gray over black-white distinctions, and diversity over sameness.
We call this dividing line an authoritarian one, and we find that what side of the line people fall on explains their positions on a wide-ranging set of issues, including race, immigration, gay rights, civil liberties, and terrorism... We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Dday: I would say that in general, opposition to any social insurance program for the less fortunate meets head-on with racial animus. Whether the presumed leader of this policy shift is white or black, a substantial portion of those with racial resentment pictures that leader as delivering their tax dollars to the undeserving other...
What these professors are really probing is the lizard brain, the tribal identifiers that often bubble to the surface, in unguarded moments, as racism. It's almost too neat and simple to simply call it racial in intent. It goes much deeper to a visceral resentment, a put-upon persecution complex, this constant paranoia that someone else is getting a better deal... It's purely an emotional release to explain whatever personal failings or lack of compassion already exists...
These thoughts have taken decades if not hundreds of years to wind through the American lizard brain. It will take perhaps as much time to wind them out.
