| The anti-Obama cult |
| In the GOP’s hatred of the president,
the rote ravings of True Believers |
| By Gary Kamiya (from
Salon) |
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 On Wednesday morning, I opened the New York
Times to read that president Hu Jin-Tao had denounced the West
for launching a culture war against China. “We must clearly see
that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic
plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and
cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term
infiltration,” Hu pronounced in “Seeking Truth,” a Communist
Party magazine. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and
complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms
and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard
and respond.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it really possible
that such wooden slogans were still being used by the leaders of
the country with the most dynamic economy on earth? “We should
deeply understand”? “Always sound the alarms”? Those antique
phrases sounded like they’d been torn from a poster that had
been pasted up during the Cultural Revolution and somehow never
taken down. It seemed that not that much had changed since
soon-to-be-Chairman Mao was writing tomes rejoicing in titles
like “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good
Thing” and urging the members of the party to cut off the head
of imperialist snakes. A belief system as nutty as Maoism took a
long time to get out of a nation’s system. I pitied the poor 1.3
billion Chinese, living in a country so insecure, so adolescent,
so in thrall to authoritarian nationalism, that its politicians
felt impelled to keep the cult alive. Thank God I’m an American,
I told myself. We have plenty of cults, but at least they don’t
get involved with our national politics.
Then I watched Michele Bachmann’s withdrawal speech.
Bachmann’s speech was a religious testimony, informing us that
on the evening of March 21, 2010, she had a divine revelation.
OK, she didn’t use the word “divine,” but that was basically the
idea. You see, her holy revelation started with the Founding
Fathers. And for Bachmann, Washington and Jefferson, if not
literally angels, are flying around in their neighborhood.
“Entrusted to every American is their responsibility to watch
over our Republic,” she began her speech. “You can look back
from the time of the Pilgrims to the time of William Penn, to
the time of our Founding Fathers. All we have to do is look
around because very clearly we are encompassed with a great
cloud of witnesses that bear witness to the sacrifices that were
made to establish the U.S. and the precious principle of freedom
that has made it the greatest force for good that has ever been
seen on the planet.”
The “great cloud of witnesses” is a biblical term. By invoking
it, Bachmann moved the Founding Fathers into the company of the
prophets. And then she related her own humble journey to join
the saved souls atop that great cloud – an epic quest that was
spurred by the near-miraculous intercession of a painting of the
Founding Fathers signing the Constitution.
“Every schoolchild is familiar with this painting,” Bachmann
said. “But I’ve been privileged to see it on a regular basis,
doing my duties in Congress. But never were the painting’s
poignant reminder more evident than on the evening of March 21,
2010. That was the evening that Obamacare was passed and staring
out from the painting are the faces of the founders, and in
particular the face of Ben Franklin, who served as a constant
reminder of the fragile Republic that he and the founders gave
to us. That day served as the inspiration for my run for the
President of the United States, because I believed firmly that
what Congress had done and what President Obama had done in
passing Obamacare endangered the very survival of the United
States of America, our Republic.”
Bachmann closed her sermon by saying, “I look forward to the
next chapter in God’s plan.”
Of such blinding revelations, religions are made. And cults.
The Republican hatred of Obama has become a cult. It is
typically dressed up with the trappings of Christianity, but the
cult does not reflect the teachings of that Jewish heretic known
as Jesus of Nazareth — unless you believe, as Bachmann appears
to, that defeating “Obamacare” is an essential part of the
Lord’s master plan for the universe. (Personally, I would have
thought that the great soul who reached out to the poor, the
sick and the despised would have preferred universal healthcare
over a system devoted to swelling the profits of those
modern-day money-changers known as insurance companies, but what
do I know?) But that is not to say that the version of
Christianity embraced by many members of the anti-Obama cult
does not play a key role in the movement, in ways we shall
presently explore.
The anti-Obama cult is based on an irrational, grossly excessive
fear and hatred of something the cult members call “big
government” or “socialism,” and an equally irrational worship of
something they call “freedom” or “liberty.” The fear and hatred
of big government is irrational and excessive because Obama’s
innocuous heathcare bill, the passage of which cult members like
Bachmann see as the beginning of the end for America, is far
less momentous as a piece of “social engineering” than Social
Security, Medicare, welfare or progressive taxation.
We already live in a world where government intrudes on our
freedom in a multitude of ways. Moreover, other enormous,
impersonal forces, mainly corporate ones, constrain our liberty
even more directly. Many of the “average Americans” the cult
members claim to be speaking for lost their life savings when
the bubble caused by an orgy of unregulated financial
speculation burst – a far greater infringement on their
“freedom” than being required to carry health insurance.
As for Obama himself, he is a bland left-leaning centrist, a
slightly more liberal clone of moderate Republicans like Dwight
D. Eisenhower, and his “socialist” policies are part of a long
American tradition that goes back to FDR.
Why, then, did the anti-Obama cult suddenly take over the entire
Republican Party?
The main reason, I believe, is that the American right was
backed into a corner and had no other card to play. The
disastrous presidency of George W. Bush revealed the complete
bankruptcy (literally) of the two core right-wing nostrums,
“freedom” (good) and “big government” (bad). “Freedom” had led
to the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression. And big
government – which was greatly expanded by Bush, to the
deafening silence of the soon-to-be-anti-Obama fanatics – had
done nothing to prevent it. In the wreckage left by Bush, there
was nothing for the right to do, if it wanted to live to fight
another day, except deny causality (and reality) and demonize
Obama. By naively reaching out to Republicans, Obama let them
get away with this, and squandered a teachable moment that could
have changed the face of American politics.
The right survived. But defending this indefensible position
squeezed its core beliefs into a kind of black hole, a blank
spot of pure resentment, devoid of content, where the laws of
logic did not apply. (According to Wikipedia, “Black holes of
stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars
collapse at the end of their life cycle.”) As a result,
“freedom” and its evil twin, “big government,” became
metaphysical concepts, so elastic and amorphous that they could
mean anything or nothing. They have come to play the same role
in right-wing discourse as “the bourgeoisie” and “the workers”
do in Marxism – they’re catchalls that can be plugged into any
situation.
Thus, “big government” mostly means “giving money to undeserving
people with dark skin” – a core GOP belief, central to the party
since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, that Rick Santorum was rash
enough to articulate. But it also has a cultural dimension in
which it means pointy-headed elites who look down on “real
Americans.” And trickiest of all, it also has a personal
dimension in which it means anything that limits individual
freedom — which explains the appeal, to those Republicans and
independents who are genuine and consistent libertarians, of Ron
Paul. (It is because “freedom” does not actually mean anything
in the orthodox right-wing universe that non-libertarian
conservatives like Romney, Bachmann, Santorum and the rest can
advocate for intrusive drug laws, anti-gay laws and massive
military budgets, while wrapping themselves in the mantle of
“liberty.”)
Because “big government” does not have a fixed meaning,
attacking it can simultaneously serve as a rallying cry for
racial resentment, an impassioned demand for personal liberation
and a marker of class- and region-based solidarity. This is why
when the Republican candidates inveigh against big government,
which they do approximately every time they open their mouths,
their rants have all the weird, malevolent imprecision of a
Stalinist attack on “running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.”
They are the ravings of True Believers, of cult members.
Also lurking in that black hole was the one right-wing card that
Bush did not destroy, because it is indestructible — the
“culture war.” The far right’s free-floating hatred of America’s
liberal, secular culture waxes and wanes, but it never goes
away, and it is responsible for the rise of Rick Santorum, the
GOP’s latest Dispose-a-Candidate. For Santorum, sinful modern
life is to blame for everything, and it is our duty to always
sound the alarms and remain vigilant against it. Thus, when the
Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal broke, Santorum blamed, not
the church that covered it up or the individual priests who
disgraced themselves and abused their position, but – Boston.
He wrote:
“When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected.
While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that
Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in
America, lies at the center of the storm. We must clearly see
that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic
plot of liberalizing and dividing America, and ideological and
cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term
infiltration.”
OK, I borrowed that last sentence from the quote by Comrade Hu,
but you have to admit it tracks pretty well with the thoughts of
Chairman Santorum.
The implosion of right-wing ideology and the persistence of the
culture war toxin might have been enough by itself to create the
anti-Obama cult, but two other factors also played a role. The
first was his race. For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign
object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic
activated their immune systems – hence the “birther” movement
and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s
aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic
question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde
of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like
organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp
lines between Us and Them.
The second reason involves Christianity. As Michele Bachmann’s
speech demonstrated, for many devout right-wing Christians,
there is no real difference between politics and religion. If
religion is the uppermost thing in one’s life, if Jesus is with
one every minute of every day, then it is easy to see how a true
believer like Bachmann could come to see preserving her vision
of the Republic as a semi-sacred trust, and defeating “Obamacare”
as an essential part of that godly mission. Moreover, devoutly
literalistic Christians tend to divide the world up into Good
and Evil, with the founding dyad of God and the devil lurking in
the background; it is not too much of a stretch to say that for
many right-wing Christians, Barack Obama is at least of the
devil’s party, if not Beelzebub himself.
Let me make it clear that I am not arguing that Christianity
itself is a cult, or that Christians (or adherents of any
religion) are inherently drawn to cultlike thinking. I am simply
making the case that the right wing’s irrational hatred of Obama
is cultlike, and that the literalist Christian faith of many
right-wing opponents of Obama, including many of the GOP
presidential candidates, clearly plays a role in their extreme
beliefs.
To be sure, much of the anti-Obama cult is just Machiavellian
politics. You hunt where the ducks are, and the ducks in this
case are loons. It is extremely unlikely that Mitt Romney stares
at a painting of Ben Franklin every day and has celestial
visions of turning back Obama’s satanic plan to destroy America
— which is precisely why the True Believers can’t stand him. But
things have gotten Chairman Mao-y enough in the Republican Party
that Romney has been forced to do his best to pretend he is a
card-carrying member of the People’s Glorious Tea Party,
Determined to Kill All Wriggling Socialist Snakes. Whether a
fake cult member will prove more attractive to Republican voters
than the genuine article will determine who will face Obama this
fall. |
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