Sunday, March 28, 2010

Frank Rich: "The rage is not about health care." It's a response to "an immutable change in the very identity of America"

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"Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too."
-- Frank Rich, in his NYT column today,
"The Rage Is Not About Health Care"

From the Rich column:
To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course.
Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since -- from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded. . . .
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7 Comments:

At 8:20 PM, Blogger Celestite said...

This is excellent.

 
At 12:21 AM, Anonymous Worldvacation said...

This is wonderful.

 
At 5:28 AM, Blogger Pats said...

The main thing about the teabaggers... is they have no ideas. They have nothing to sell except fear and (yes) hatred.

I actually had an elderly lady ask me the other day, completely seriously, if I thought Obama was the Antichrist. I said, there is true evil in this world. But no, I don't think Obama is the embodiment of that.

 
At 11:58 AM, Anonymous Egbert Wikitiki said...

I could not agree with the sentiment, "Down with Tyranny" more. Tyranny is when a government acts in direct opposition to the will of the majority that elected them. Tyranny is when one party takes complete power and pushes a strictly partisan agenda without any regard to the opinions of the people. Tyranny is when a government is so sure of its own superiority to the people they serve that they disregard the pleas of the people and force laws onto them that don't apply to that very government. Yes, I am definitely opposed to that--and no doubt most of you reading this will instantly label me a racist because I disagree with President Obama on anything, or think of me as a fascist because I oppose a totalitarian government. Such opinions, masked in pseudo intellectual rhetoric, I expect, are simultaneously inflammatory and immature, but those have been the cornerstone of the Democratic party for quite some time now, which is why I felt the party to become an Independent (and certainly most of you have already labeled me a Republican because my views differ from yours; sticks and stones: call me what you want--it's the name callers that prove their own childishness).

 
At 1:27 PM, Blogger Pats said...

So did you have a point? Or just felt a rant coming on and wanted to dump some bile here?

Funny how so many teabaggers didn't care about the rights of the people when the previous administration was using illegal wiretaps, or had suspended habeas corpus. Swearing to uphold the Constitution and then ignoring it. That's not tyranny?

 
At 6:35 PM, Blogger MacD said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 6:36 PM, Blogger MacD said...

It appears you are AS afraid of Tea Partiers as the GOP members you suggest here are (too) because it took you the entire article to mention they are mostly all white. Why not state your premmise that this is all really about racism in your first paragraph? Why dance around the issue?
(sorry for double post but can't edit otherwise)

 

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