HuffPo reports:
Race-based attacks and criticism of President Obama have been on the rise during the dog days of August. And they're not just happening at health care town hall protests.
A reader sent over a picture of a group of protesters camped outside Rep. Susan Davis's (D-Calif.). "Neighborhood Day" event this past week, brandishing signs calling the president a Black Supremacist and suggesting he's a Nazi disciple.
"Black National Socialism Is Not Utopia," reads one poster.
Another has a picture of Obama's former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, juxtaposed with a picture of Adolph Hitler and one of picture of Obama and Wright together. "Obama's Church: Black Supremacist," it reads.
The protesters, the reader writes, were small in number. But their presence outside the event indicates that four weeks into August, the highly personal and often racially tinged vitriol directed at the president shows no sign of abating.
Earlier this week, Idaho Republican gubernatorial hopeful, Rex Rammell, said he'd buy a license to hunt Obama. Meanwhile, Rep. Lynn Jenkins, (R-Kans.) expressed her wish that the Republican Party would find a "great white hope" to take on the president in the next election.
This, to me, demonstrates something that political scientists have long theorized but have not yet been able to conclusively prove: the connection between race and public goods.
Public goods are tricky things. Even if a public good benefits the nation as a whole, it's usually not clear how much benefit any one specific person is going to get. If the government builds a highway, for example, exactly which people are going to reap the rewards? New industries will be created. Some towns will grow, others will shrink. Even if I know the highway is worth the price for the country (in terms of increased GDP), it's hard to know if my personal benefit will be worth the taxes I pay. And sometimes politicians, with access to detailed econometric analyses and data, might know that answer better than I do, and just not let on (because revealing who's going to lose out might lose the politician some votes). When I look at a proposed project, I tend to ask: What do the leaders know about this project that I don't?
In order to answer this question, people might look at the politician's race - or, more generally, his tribe (where he comes from, what kind of lifestyle he leads, etc.). They might conclude that he's likely to approve public goods that will help his fellow tribesmen and hurt only the members of other tribes. Thus, some people will only approve of public goods purchases if the leader doing the purchasing comes from their own tribe.
That's why Southern and rural whites - the Americans most likely to think of "white" as their tribal identity - are going insane with rage and hatred over the Obama presidency, and fighting rabidly against any and all public goods provision under Obama's banner. They assume that any government spending Obama does will benefit blacks and wind up costing whites. Conservatives had no problem with government spending when it was Bush lavishing untold billions on the military and the DHS; after all, Bush was a "regular guy" like them, remember? People just assumed he wouldn't take money out of his own Southern white tribe's pockets and hand it over to blacks and Hispanics.
Now let's back up a bit, and think about the difference between Kenya and Germany. Kenya, with its hodgepodge of tribes (most of which hate each other), has a government that can't get much done and often ends up just parceling out rewards to the ruling politician's tribe. Germany, however, mostly has one tribe (the so-called "Germans"), and so tends to approve massive public works projects, like highways, bridges, and R&D spending. Note that Kenya is extremely poor and Germany is extremely rich.
Are we becoming more like Kenya? Hispanic and Asian immigration is indeed turning us into a tribal patchwork (and note that these groups made Obama's election possible). Since we shouldn't and can't keep nonwhite immigrants out, our national future depends on forging a common tribal identity that connects these groups and whites together.
In fact, the modern notion of "white" people itself was created by conservatives in the 60s to be just such a catch-all American tribe. Before Nixon, Italians and Poles and other 1900-vintage immigrants weren't considered "white"; Nixon relabeled them as "whites" and appealed to their Catholic values and their business aspirations, and built a new conservative majority. Only blacks were excluded. Obviously, I don't want to see conservatives pull the same trick with Hispanics (though they would probably be wise to do so).
I'd rather we constructed a post-racial "American" identity, based on our common language and culture, as the "Han Chinese" and the "Japanese" - two very physically diverse groups that see themselves as unified "races" - have done. That tribe could really be a permanent American majority.
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