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| (AFP photo/Saul Loeb) |
WASHINGTON POST
Perhaps it was inevitable that when Michelle Obama mentioned slavery in her speech at the Democratic convention, the word would cause some conservatives to lash out in reflexive anger and resentment, as though she had tapped their knees with a rubber hammer labeled “race.” But the backlash to Obama’s speech shows better than anything what profoundly different stories the parties are telling about America.
If you didn’t watch the speech, you might have heard that Michelle mentioned the fact that the White House was built by slaves. In response, Rush Limbaugh went on a rant about how the Obamas “can’t stop talking about slavery” and are “never going to let it go,” because they’re so eager to keep white people feeling guilty. Bill O’Reilly felt it necessary to offer a defense of the whole thing, using his Fox News program to assert that the slaves working on the White House “were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.”
[For the historical rebuttal to that, check out NPR Morning Edition ]
Many people were shocked and outraged at Limbaugh and O’Reilly’s comments, but if you’re familiar with those programs, it shouldn’t have surprised you at all. For eight years, they’ve been telling their audiences that
1) the Obamas are militant black nationalists bent on racial vengeance who have twisted the federal government into a cudgel used to bludgeon white people; and
2) in America today, whites are the only true victims of discrimination, in large part because of liberals’ relentless, baseless charges of racism, a weapon of “political correctness” used to keep whites down.
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When conservatives hear liberals talk about Selma, or about slavery, or about the internment of the Japanese during World War II, or about other dark moments from our past, they hear it as unpatriotic and bitter, running down a country that deserves not criticism but praise. That’s because their version of the American story is a very different one. While liberals celebrate progress and change, the American story conservatives usually want to tell is one of national perfection: God made America to be the greatest country on earth, it always has been and it always will be. Sure, there were times we didn’t live up to our ideals, but we don’t want to dwell on them; what’s important is that we’re the greatest.
That’s why they became so obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama “apologizes for America,” when all he was doing was acknowledging the mistakes of the past. For conservatives, the liberal version of the American story is self-contradictory. How can you think that America is great if you keep bringing up things it did wrong?
Because it’s about progress and change, the liberal version of the American story also celebrates the kinds of social changes that many conservatives find so unnerving, like increasing racial diversity and the granting of full civil rights to gay people. Which brings us to the third version of the American story currently in wide circulation: Donald Trump’s version.
This story says that America’s greatness is not to be found in progress (the liberal version) or inherent and eternal (the traditional conservative version), but that it was once great but no longer is. America was great back when no one questioned the primacy of white male Christians and everyone else knew their place, but now we’ve got immigrants and Muslims and feminists and a black guy in the White House who can’t possibly be the legitimate American president so he must be a foreigner (don’t forget that Trump is America’s most prominent birther), and why don’t you damn kids pull up your pants, turn down that god-awful rap music and get the hell off my lawn.
Trump’s version of the American story didn’t come out of nowhere; as he does so often, he took what many conservatives were implying and made it explicit. So he argues that the America of today is a hellhole where nothing works and everyone’s miserable, but once we kick out the immigrants, keep out the Muslims, punch those uppity protesters in the face and build a gigantic wall, greatness will be restored. That’s the logical conclusion of the messages that Republican voters have been getting from the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly for a long time now.
So while any Republican with half a brain is fretting about the fact that their party can’t find a way to appeal to voters who aren’t old, white, and pissed off about it, the Democrats are putting on a spectacle of American diversity in Philadelphia. And the GOP’s presidential nominee is running a white nationalist campaign based on alienating as many different kinds of Americans as possible. It’s the only story about America that he knows how to tell.
PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES
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PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES
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If what bothers you about America is, instead, the fact that it doesn’t look exactly the way it did in the past (or the way you imagine it looked in the past), then you don’t love your country — you care only about your tribe.
And all too many influential figures on the right are tribalists, not patriots.
We got a graphic demonstration of that reality after Michelle Obama’s speech, when she spoke of the wonder of watching her daughters play on the lawn of “a house that was built by slaves.” It was an uplifting and, yes, patriotic image, a celebration of a nation that is always seeking to become better, to transcend its flaws.
But all many people on the right — especially the media figures who set the Republican agenda — heard was a knock on white people. “They can’t stop talking about slavery,” complained Rush Limbaugh. The slaves had it good, insisted Bill O’Reilly: “They were well fed and had decent lodgings.” Both men were, in effect, saying that whites are their tribe and must never be criticized.
This same tribal urge surely underlies a lot of the right’s rhetoric about national security. Why are Republicans so fixated on the notion that the president must use the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” when actual experts on terrorism agree that this would actually hurt national security, by helping to alienate peaceful Muslims?
The answer, I’d argue, is that the alienation isn’t a side effect they’re disregarding; it’s actually the point — it’s all about drawing a line between us (white Christians) and them (everyone else), and national security has nothing to do with it.
Which brings us to the Vlad-Donald bromance. Mr. Trump’s willingness to cast aside our nation’s hard-earned reputation as a reliable ally is remarkable. So is the odd specificity of his support for Mr. Putin’s priorities, which is in stark contrast with the vagueness of everything else he has said about policy. And he has offered only evasive non-answers to questions about his business ties to Putin-linked oligarchs.
But what strikes me most is the silence of so many leading Republicans in the face of behavior they would have denounced as treason coming from a Democrat — not to mention the active support for Mr. Trump’s stance among many in the base.
What this tells you, I think, is that all the flag-waving and hawkish posturing had nothing to do with patriotism. It was, instead, about using alleged Democratic weakness on national security as a club with which to beat down domestic opponents, and serve the interests of the tribe.
Now comes Mr. Trump, doing the bidding of a foreign power and inviting it to intervene in our politics — and that’s O.K., because it also serves the tribe.
So if it seems strange to you that these days Democrats are sounding patriotic while Republicans aren’t, you just weren’t paying attention. The people who now seem to love America always did; the people who suddenly no longer sound like patriots never were.