Frank Rich angrily ridicules the Tea Partiers and their supporters in the blogosphere who claim they never spat on Emanuel Cleaver when there's plenty of (video) evidence to the contrary. "At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis, " he writes. "They were, it seems, only whistling 'Dixie'.”
The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.
While the Tea Party fights against the idea that they're racist (they are), I think accusing them of racism is a simplification. I tend to go with political scientist Richard Hofstadter. Too bad he's not around to analyze what's going on.
“Their political reactions express … a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways.”
There's a profound split in America -- always has been -- between the elite (the elected) and the elitists, the self-selected guardians of the culture. The self-selected have stood off to one side and shouted, "We choose us, not you!" Now they're a growing part of our government. You can call it racism and wander around in that thicket for years, or you can recognize that the self-selected hate the system we have honored for more than two centuries while claiming that they're the only ones who really understand it. The signs of their allegiance are less than skin-deep: they wear their flag pins on their lapels.
So I think Richard Hofstadter, who was writing about John Birchers -- in some ways the predecessors of this era's extreme right wing -- understood the root of the problem. We're up against people who hate America and all it stands for. They're whistling a lot more than "Dixie," whether they understand that or not. It's up to us to understand that the small group of protesters calling themselves "real Americans" does indeed include unreconstructed racists, but they are crowded out by (and used by!) the biggest self-selected group we have to contend with now: corporate America.
It's way too easy to pick on people in white sheets and pointy hats out there on the streets. We should be worrying a lot more about the guys who pull their strings and ours: the self-selected who now dominate our living room and kitchen and follow us everywhere we go, their jingles in our heads, their hands in our pockets, their bought-and-paid-for members of Congress deciding our future.
