Frank Rich gets Arizona. For a start, it's not just Arizona. It's "the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America’s two major political parties."
The great unwhite are the targets, the detested rivals for privileged "equality" historically held by white Americans.
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?”
I don't think we can allow ourselves any leeway on this. If you grew up before the '60's, you knew plenty of perfectly decent people -- maybe in your own family -- who genuinely believed that brown races were inherently and irremediably inferior, or who referred to foreigners in general as "wogs."
Well, the days of separating one group of people out from another for derision and fear has hardly ended, post-'60's complacency and moral superiority to the contrary notwithstanding. The resentment of the privileged is upon us, along with the panic of the jobless and the grab for fifteen minutes of fame.
It's coming at us from all directions and turns up in east as well as west. Insults, bullying and violence are the language of the resentful. Maybe severe drought, damaging storms, economic decline, systems failures, and willful ignorance -- ignorance of Biblical proportions -- will only intensify in the summer and fall of 2010.
By December we'll know whether "analysts for both parties" are right when they predict that "Republicans probably will pick up as many as three dozen House seats, and possibly the 40 needed for control. The GOP is expected to win a few Senate seats, though the 10 necessary to take control is considered a long shot."
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It's hard not to associate the racism and ignorance we're seeing now with the American South in the long wake of its own economic disaster 150 years ago. The South may have changed in many ways, but it clings, politically, to its resentment and hold on Congress. Resentment once contained in the actual South is now as national as the Tea Party's racism and economic resentments.
One Democratic leader, though, was embraced by that group in that group, and I'm not thinking about Bill Clinton. Howard Dean, when he was running in the 2004 primaries, was amazingly popular among right wing libertarians in Texas and Mississippi, at least. Local right wing talk show hosts and callers embraced him. "He's a straight talker." "He's not one of 'them'." Somewhere in that unpolled reality is a lesson.
