That's just UNCONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Here's a blogger who thinks that "birthers," "deathers," and "truthers" are basing their wild claims not on facts or logic, but on intuitively valid unconscious reasoning:

So instead of mocking them, I will try to articulate the unexpressed reasoning of the Birthers, Deathers and and Truthers...

The Birther claims are utterly implausible. Yet, how plausible is that the same America that reelected George Bush and Dick Cheney would elect a brilliant champion of Reason with a Black wife, Black children, a Black father and the middle name of Hussein?...The Birthers are delusional, but perhaps they are reacting to the sheer implausibility of Barack Obama...

The Deathers are likewise perversely wrong about the health care reform mission. They are not wrong to worry however. If Obama succeeds, as I think he will, the world of health care will be recast. Nobody knows what all the side-effects and unanticipated consequences will be...

Lastly, the Truthers...When poor, pitiful, Richard Reid tried to ignite his shoes I began to doubt, and the more we saw, the more al Qaeda seemed to be a conspiracy of the dullard...So how could these medieval drudges have ever been so horribly, terribly successful? It defies Reason that such a convoluted plot should have worked.

OK, dude. I'll spot you the Deathers and the Truthers. Major institutional reform is scary and uncertain, yes. And yes, 9/11 was just a little too movie-spectacular - and just a little too beneficial to the electoral fortunes of the Republicans - to have been a routine terrorist job.

But to say that Birthers are reacting to the improbability of Obama by denying he's native-born? How does that make any kind of intuitive sense? How could a conspiracy by Obama's mother to fake his native-born status - all so that he could be eligible run for President someday - actually make Obama's implausible election any more likely? If this is really the thought process going through the Birthers' heads, then they really are simply dumb as rocks, intuitively or otherwise.

But that is not actually the thought process running through the Birthers' heads. The thought process is actually something very different, something that is transparently easy to see. It goes something like this:

"We don't want no nigger runnin' our country."

Birthers are expressing simple fear of the outsider. Since time immemorial, white Southerners have been governed by people who seemed at least somewhat like themselves - Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and LBJ might have had weird liberal ideas, but at least they were white and spoke with Southern twangs and had parents and grandparents born in the U.S. But Obama is a half-black son of an African immigrant, and that's on top of his weird liberal ideas. He doesn't even talk like the black people that Southerners know. He's Harvard-educated, an intellectual multiracial cosmopolitan - what suburban shit-kickin' middle-aged white Southerner knows anyone like that?

All around them, Americans who define their identity as "white" find their county changing. Suddenly, the nation is filled with people who don't fit the traditional black-white dichotomy - Hispanic gardeners and roofers swarming over the countryside, Asians filling up subdivisions and classrooms, weird Macacas from who-knows-where holding high-paying jobs when white people are losing theirs left and right. How did those Macacas get those high-paying jobs anyway?

The 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of immigration unmatched since the turn of the last century, and it saw the creation of the black middle class. White people who never really thought of themselves in racial terms, and who were not solidly anchored in their communities - i.e. educated professionals - had no problem with this. A lot of other white people had reservations, but the economic benefit trumped the fear of change. But there are a lot of white people out there for whom community is #1, and for whom the introduction of nonwhites is extremely disruptive to the traditional relationships in their communities.

These are the Birthers. Their message is simple: Go away, people who are strange and unfamiliar. You are not truly one of us. You do not belong here.

(PS - Extra points for anyone who gets the song reference in the title. LOTS of extra points.)

Update: Timothy Noah (what a great last name!) at Slate is thinking along similar lines.

Update 2: Matt Yglesias is thinking along somewhat similar lines.