The Return of the RepressedMichelle Goldberg,
The American Prospect: Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself...
For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety... The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore...
It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right -- they were initially deeply intertwined... As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a Kulturkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and lesbians. The movement convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off.
Frank Schaeffer, to Rachel Maddow: We have a subculture... that is bred from birth, through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever to reject facts as a matter of faith... Can Christianity be rescued from Christians?... When you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our President is the anti-Christ you have to draw one of two conclusions.
Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they're beyond crazy. And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation and that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America. We have a bit slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon...
A group of people who are resentful because they know they've been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature... These people are standing on a hill top waiting for the end and this is a dangerous group to have as neighbors. And they're our national neighbors... It's a disaster.
CNN: William Jelani Cobb, who has written extensively about race and politics, said Obama's election has also rekindled the historic rancor some whites feel against successful blacks... 'The upsurge of riots at the beginning of the 20th century was driven in part by the fact that blacks were perceived to be moving up in society -- at the expense of whites... Now we have a black president, which means, on its most basic level, that a black man has more power than any single white citizen in this country... Whether people want to admit it or not, I suspect the Tea Party crowd believes that the currency of whiteness has been devalued.'
David Michael Green, Common Dreams: The folks most aggrieved and most estranged from their senses of late are precisely the people who were bought off of their sanity at every turn with the latest form of bigotry du jour, used to assuage their ever-diminishing sense of relative social status. Over and over again, the people I see on my television screen acting absolutely and incoherently stupid in their senseless rage seem to be little more than fat, white, Southern, sixty-something racist good ol' boys.
Well past their sell-by dates, they've of course gotten tremendous help cranking it up again. That's no surprise. I'm not sure these crackers are smart enough to even be stupid without coaching...
It takes a willful act of ignorance (something we see a lot of these days) not to perceive the United States as the latest in history's failing empires... Unlike Rome, this puppy is taking decades, rather than centuries, to collapse.
Empires come and go, of course. Rising and falling is what they do... What is truly frightening to contemplate, however, is what happens when an empire falls in the era when technological capacity absolutely dwarfs political maturity? And what happens if that occurs not just anywhere, but in arguably the most immature, self-serving and self-indulgent of developed societies on the planet?
