Decoding the redbaiting

So President Obama has done gone and committed another outrageous act. What the White House is calling "a sort of pep talk" for students starting a new school year, critics are labeling liberal "indoctrination" (Joshua Rhett Miller, Foxnews.com), and an attempt to spread "socialist ideology" (Florida GOP Chair Jim Greer). It's also "unprecedented" according to another (Robbin Swad, Miami City Buzz Examiner), a sentiment apparent in all the angry surprise, but true only if we ignore that Presidents Ronald Reagan and the George H. W. Bush made similar addresses in 1986 and 1991 (I found these links at Post on Politics). The Reagan speech was particularly partisan--basically his cut-taxes-build-up-the-military policy. But not much hue and cry back in them days.

My first reaction was similar to that represented in this editorial cartoon:

From http://www.courier-journal.com/graphics/2009/09/marcmurphy.jpg

But on second thought, that's an awfully unfair way to respond to the critics. Calling people stupid with whom you disagree is a perfect way to start an argument, but not a useful discussion. Anyway, the criticism is about the lesson plans accompanying the address, which is reasonable. It's not surprising that many Americans, especially in this more distrustful post-Watergate era, don't want their kids getting a lesson in how they can best serve the president.

What troubles me is the vocabulary many people resort to in their criticism of the President, the language in all of the recent criticism that involves the terms socialism, communism, marxism, or even, bizarrely in the same breath, fascism. I suggest that one element--and before some of you start yelling so loud you don't hear the rest--ONE element in this discourse is racial fear.

It is only one element because there are clearly a lot of valid concerns and questions about the whole range of policies the administration has advocated. In the healthcare debate, for example, there are good questions about whether or not we can afford it, whether or not reform will accomplish what it's supposed to do, whether or not it will set up a drift into greater government intervention that may be unnecessary or worse, and so on.

And I don't believe that racism explains why particular people are seemingly mobilizing in opposition to anything the Obama administration proposes. Many Americans did the same thing with the previous Bush administration, particularly as his war in Iraq went sour, and more and more evidence appeared of the mendacity of his administration in promoting the war.

And we’ve heard this kind of talk before in the public square. But it used to be the fringe right—the John Birch Society guys, Opus Dei acolytes, young Talk Radio mavens just starting their move to the right of Paul Harvey, or the occasional old academic squirreled away in some college who hadn't had a new thought since being scared to death in the sixties by Black activists on campus. Now it’s ubiquitous. It’s mainstream. The Cold War ended twenty years ago, so why in the world has redbaiting resurged with a vengeance?

One reason is that the baby-boomer generation was steeped in a Cold War rhetoric that identified and simplified the enemy. There have been laments that Americans have grown culturally illiterate, and it may be true that fewer people know their Bible or their Homer, but we still know our culture’s terms for the bad guys. But, in this supposed post-racial America, the norms of public discourse have changed. They do not permit racialized language. But think about what socialism and its variants mean when used so broadly. They are code for 'un-American,' as in President Obama wants to indoctrinate our kids with 'un-American ideas;' he is engaged in ‘un-American activities;’ the President is 'un-American,' or even 'not an American.' He is not what the vast majority of his vociferous critics are, White Americans.

Consider the broader context. During the presidential campaign, we heard pundits (not necessarily all conservative) repeatedly "slip" in saying "Osama" rather than Obama (e.g., Rush Limbaugh), or emphasizing his middle name "Hussein," (e.g., Mary Matalin), or the popular urban legend that Obama was secretly (still) a Muslim (e.g., Debbie Schlussel, with mosquewatch.blogspot.com keeping the ridiculous legend alive). And there's the ongoing absurd campaign challenging the President's birth certificate, and therefore his citizenship. Nobody's talking race in the public square; but there's been a bunch of White pundits and bloggers making claims, some less subtle than others, that Barack Obama is not American, and linking him to non-White enemies of America.

We also heard VP candidate Sarah Palin tell a North Carolina audience:

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

So, as many wondered at the time (most notably, Jon Stewart), what lies outside these little pockets, these places that happen to include very socially diverse populations, places where Barack Obama lived, traveled, and campaigned? Fake America. Anti-America. Un-America.

Now, we could take any particular one of these, and argue that it was just an unfortunate misstatement that the speaker may truly regret. Taken together, however, they form a kind of collage, a narrative in which the Black man in the White House is always going to be suspect, not just because of the policies he advocates, but because of who he is. And for far too many, the label socialist or communist is enough to make the point.

It's really a rather old narrative--based on categories that separate the real from the un-American. Mid-19th century "Know-nothings" were certain that Catholic immigrants, those papists, could not be real Americans. Late 19th century nativists regularly confused anarchists and socialists with non-Western European immigrants (who included more of those papists, along with Jews). And it's no accident that it's common for those today urging restrictionist immigration legislative, and punishment for undocumented immigrants, to equate immigrants with threats to America, and as incapable of being real Americans (Lou Dobbs, Patrick Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, among others). It bubbles up in different ways, but always this fear of the other, this fear of those who now have a seat at the table we Whites once controlled, and where our voice used to be the predominant one.

It's a mystery to me why, given our centuries-old legacy of racial inequality, and given the seemingly intractable ethnic and racial conflicts throughout the world, so many White Americans cannot accept the notion that we too just might still have hang-ups about race. We've made some great strides, to be sure, but, please, there are still tens of millions of Americans who can remember (maybe not acknowledge) when apartheid was sanctioned in the US. You think we've somehow gotten over this, just like that?

To recap, I'm not arguing that racism governs the criticism of the Obama administration, or that its critics are racist because he's Black. I am arguing that race lurks underneath the arguments that make the accusation that President Obama, or his policies, are anti- or un-American, coded in the terms socialist, communist, or marxist. And whatever the ultimate reason for resorting to Cold War terms to criticize a post-Cold War presidency, it’s regrettable. It gives name to a vague fear, but doesn’t offer helpful criticism. It paints a false picture of a policy debate in which there is zero-sum cosmic struggle between real Americans and un-Americans. This picture obscures the much more important matters of the array of goals, the kinds of challenges, and the range of solutions we must consider in a policy debate.

Thinking about the cartoon above, I'd like to think that Americans resort to lame redbaiting labels to make their case not because they’re stupid, but because most of us Whites are still messed up when it comes to race, and therefore not well-equipped to argue coherently with a Black president in an age when we've forsworn overt racial language in the public square.