In Thailand, disaffected traditional elites who kept losing at the ballot box marched in the street, shut down the government, and pressured the army into staging a coup. Similar things have happened across Latin America and Southeast Asia. In Russia, Putin's security-state elites took power in an election and never gave the opposition another chance to get it back. The world in general seems to be entering a period in which democracy is delegitimized by militant ethnic and factional movements. But it couldn't happen here in the U.S., right? Because of (insert calming bromide here), right?
Maybe so. But I can't help but notice more and more stories like this one:
A Virginia Republican's fierce call to resist President Obama's political agenda -- with bullets, if necessary -- ignited an outcry on the Internet yesterday...Appearing at a "Tea Party" rally Wednesday to protest Obama's expansion of government, Catherine Crabill, a political neophyte running for the House of Delegates in the Northern Neck, quoted from a March 1775 speech by Patrick Henry and then went further, calling on Americans to resist the course Obama has set for the country.
"We have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box," Crabill said. "But that's the beauty of our Second Amendment right. I am glad for all of us who enjoy the use of firearms for hunting. But make no mistake. That was not the intent of the Founding Fathers. Our Second Amendment right was to guard against tyranny."
Crabill, a real estate agent and home-schooling mother of four, said yesterday that she would not back down from her defense of the right to use bullets to address government grievances, saying that if fiery words were good enough for Henry, they're good enough for her.
"Those are my convictions," Crabill, 52, said in a telephone interview. "I am a full-blooded, freedom-loving American, and what we're seeing in Washington is domestic terrorism at its worst."
This is the most extreme example of this sort of thing that we've seen so far. But before this, there was Rick Perry's Texas secession threat, and that poll this year that found that a third of Republicans, nationwide, want their state to secede from the Union. Then, of course, there's the "birther" movement, which recently gained support from ten Republican Congressmen.
It's not hard to figure out the reason for this dire rhetoric. 2008 showed Republicans that they're going to either have to accommodate some chunk of Hispanic voters or face a very long period out of power. The GOP, however, has spent the last 30+ years using (white) racial identity politics to secure itself a base; expanding its racial tent to include Hispanics would thus be a massive turnaround that would be both difficult and (electorally) dangerous to pull off. It might be easier to simply exert power not as a majority, but as a well-organized, well-armed, semi-desperate minority. Meanwhile, lots of Republican voters are convinced that America is only America if its institutions (business, government) are dominated by the white race; they fear the collapse of a system, an order, that is based to some degree on tribal affinity.
Which is why we're seeing secession threats, rebellion threats, right-wing terrorism and the tacit encouragement thereof, questioning of Obama's legitimacy, and dire apocalyptic language from the likes of Glenn Beck. It is a process that has happened many times before, in many countries, and it is happening here, now.
This is the greatest threat facing our country - not the economy, not China, not global warming. Nothing kills a nation-state more quickly, more completely, and more finally than ethnic strife led by militant elites.
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