In an NPR interview airing today, President Obama conducts a long-needed public tutorial on a few of the eccentricities of contemporary right-wing politics. What Donald Trump is "exploiting during the course of his campaign," says Obama (who, I assume, is using Trump symbolically), is that "particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy." This unpigmented bloc is also experiencing an incursion of unlike demographics; it is listening to the pounding drivel of the right's clatter machine — "that somehow [Obama is] different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc."; and it is suffering from the profound delusion that ISIS — indeed "a virulent, nasty organization" — is somehow an "organization that can destroy the United States." Voila. "You combine those things," concludes Obama, "and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected."
A very nice synopsis of the current, of whose continuity one is reminded. As I have noted before, I resist the "this-is-nothing-new" narrative of political commentary, which in my opinion possesses an unappealing schoolmarmishness. Yet, as President Obama also notes in his NPR interview, it is "important for us to keep things in perspective" — and in this instance, proper perspective is intrusively historical.
Perhaps just a scattering of it; no dry, chronological survey, and certainly nothing comprehensive. What, we ask, is new about Trump, Cruz, economic distress, evangelical palsy, nativist paranoia and bogeymen everywhere, from swarthy infidels to godless fifth columnists? They have always been with us, the exploiters and the exploited. Reaganism, Gingrichism and New Rightism, hustling pretend-economic cures and whipping up religious chauvinism. Goldwaterism and Nixonism's exploitation of white backlash. The right's obscurantist pushback against New Deal experimentation (designed to save — the leftist horror of it all — capitalism). McCarthyism's defamatory conflation of liberalism, socialism, communism and Stalinism. The hysterical movement of 100 percent Americanism set against Eastern and Southern Europe's deracinated. In general the right's paranoid stylistics of dreading the differently shaded and the culturally unfamiliar; and of course its ceaseless fear of foreign ideas, its unrelenting need for enemies — foreign and domestic — and its incurable compulsion to shriek Boo!
All of which, over the decades, has now fluently vomited up Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are killing the hysteria-lagging competition in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. You want to succeed in pseudoconservative politics? Simply yell Boo louder and more often. The children of the right just love to be frightened. Always have, always will.