(The picture, of an unnamed protester, is from Sen. Arlen Specter's town hall meeting today. Via AP.)Many people have questioned the wisdom of Chris Matthews and MSNBC for putting the gun-carrying wingnut on the air and giving him an opportunity to talk.
I can understand that criticism. There is only one reason the man showed up with a loaded gun and a provocative sign* at a town hall meeting devoted to, of all things, health care reform. (Health care! Oh, the irony...) And that reason was to draw attention to himself and his position, if one can call it that. By appearing on the Matthews' program, he got that and then some, more than he deserved. It is easy to predict that he will become a hero of the far right-wing fringe and a fodder for the progressive ridicule.
On the other hand, however, the interview was useful inasmuch as it showed that there is no "there" there. The man could not/would not directly answer Matthews' questions and instead spouted off the well-worn slogans taken straight from the liberty or death bag of the right wingnuttery.
He could be easily dismissed as just another whackjob, which he is in some respects, but his presence at the meeting with the loaded gun and the justifications that he gave for it point to something quite serious and insidious: the white wingnut rage brewing just barely under the surface of the American life this summer (though not only).
In the wingnut's mind, the loaded gun was for "self-defense." As absurd as it sounds, this reasoning shows the deepening fear and projected hatred which have been sweeping the white America -- or some of its segments -- seemingly for ages and which have now intensified with the election of Barack Obama to the highest office.
We know this projected hatred, and the rage it produces, quite well: it too often comes to a boil in political assassinations and acts of domestic terrorism. Mr. Wingnut feels threatened in his rights to "liberty" or whatever may be on his mind, so, in self-defense, he may think nothing of obliterating others, whom he perceives as the source of this threat. We have seen it before.
Right-wing talk show hosts, Limbaugh, Beck and their ilk, stoke the fear and rage with their absurdist rhetoric, which, unfortunately, finds a captive audience in this segment of the population as it "explains" these individuals' disadvantaged position in life, justifies their fears, and further demonizes the others, who, in their eyes, are responsible for it all.
Never mind that Limbaugh and Beck spew their nonsense from the safety of their well-cushioned ivory towers, obscenely compensated for doing nothing more than fomenting disorder and rage. The run-of-the-mill wingnut does not take time to stop and notice what's really being done to him and for what reason -- he grabs his loaded gun, in self-defense, to come to a presidential meeting devoted to, of all things, the health care reform.
We have seen this before and we know where it leads. It is absolutely incumbent on the Republican leaders and talk show hosts to tone down their hateful rhetoric to prevent tragedies that may be just around the corner. If they don't, we will hold them responsible.
BTW, perhaps we can bring back a bit of Dubya's "war on terra" thinking and tactics, because we are clearly dealing with terrorism of the domestic kind here.
*As Cenk Uygur points out, This is the same exact quote Tim McVeigh was referencing in a shirt he wore... before bombing the Oklahoma City federal building.
Cross posted at The Middle of Nowhere
Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it. NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell during the Clinton years.
Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But he embraced all of that, and much, much more.
On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different. Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon. Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican administrations, social spending has decreased.
There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the population, but among the elite who rule it.
Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked. I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:
It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.
If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire. Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to lend money for us to do so.
Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way, I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could be ironic.
The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy -- those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people, of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world, and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.
But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal economic reforms.
Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above $100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city? Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free education through graduate school like they have in most European countries?
No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between "conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people, I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison population will not get much smaller.
I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on. Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges who dominate both parties in the Congress.
And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.