Daniel Larison, one of my favorite bloggers, hits Paul Krugman over his column today, developing the term "Krugman's Hatchet" for what he sees as a trend of "no matter how many other reasonable explanations may account for conservative behavior, the real cause is always racial panic":
The clever thing in accusing someone of “racial anxiety,” as Krugman does to the protesters against health care legislation, is that it is as hard to disprove as a conspiracy theory. No matter what explanation one provides for the intensity of opposition to Democratic health care proposals, the “real” reason for such intense opposition must be found somewhere else. One simple explanation might be this: the protesters are die-hard partisans who want to thwart Democratic initiatives as much as they can. Another might be that they see the proposed legislation as another advance towards a socialistic system that they find unacceptable and un-American on an ideological level (which may also explain the cries of “This is America!”). (The importance of Americanism as the driving force of much of the right cannot be overestimated in all of this.)
A couple of things come to mind. One, that these reasons aren't exclusive to racial anxiety. The second is that this would be easier to believe if so much of the right's case against Obama weren't explicitly racial, and if the mainstream right's "Americanism" weren't based on an understanding of what it means to be American that implicitly rejects people who aren't white. Pat Buchanan has made it clear that white people have an explicit claim to this country and its resources that the rest of us simply don't have. Who can forget Kathleen Parker's classic column about Obama's lack of "blood equity", that only those of us who "those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice" can really call themselves "full blooded Americans." (It's pretty clear from Parker's column that those who "sacrificed" through generations of chattel slavery don't count.)
There's the birth certificate, the obsession over Obama's name, the flag pin, the Muslim rumors. There's the talk of mundane Democratic policies as "welfare" or "reparations" whether we're talking about a refundable tax credits or health care reform. The implicit message is not just that Obama is a "socialist" who wants to redistribute income, but that he wants to redistribute it to "those people." There's a long tradition on the right of using labels like "socialist" and "communist" to describe black figures who they see as advancing racial equality at the expense of the existing social order. Martin Luther King Jr. the NAACP, even Malcolm X--black leaders have always all faced such smears, based in a kind of "Americanism" that privileges America's traditional racial hierarchy as the way things should be.
Then there's the health care debate itself, which has been attacked as "reparations" or as some kind of giveaway for illegal immigrants. The former claim has been embraced everywhere in the conservative media, from blogs to Fox Nation to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. As long as the most prominent voices on the right are making such arguments--it's impossible to argue the right's opposition to "redistributive" policies has nothing to do with race, even if it has to do with a number of other things as well.
In short, Larison has to take a long walk around the elephant in the room to argue that race has nothing to do with the craziness we're seeing. Larison's opposition to health care reform has nothing to do with race, but it's clear the for many people the opposite is true, and it's part of why they're so angry.
-- A. Serwer
