The Americanist Heresy Revisited
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Aziz Poonawalla thinks that my earlier post on Birthers was an attempt to “put as positive a spin on this as possible,” which seems a strange way of reading what I wrote. As Aziz and other long-time readers must know, I am not normally in the business of providing positive spin for Republicans. Given my criticisms of the dangers and problems of nationalism for conservatives and for America, and considering how unsympathetic I am to partisan tribalism, I would have thought it was clear that I was not saying anything very flattering about Birthers by saying that this obsession was a function of blind partisanship and nationalism. As I thought I made clear, this obsession is a more exaggerated, bizarre expression of equally baseless fears about Obama’s insufficient Americanness and his supposed lack of devotion to Americanism. These fears continue to prevail among most mainstream conservatives and Republicans, and they inform a large part of the conventional Republican criticism of Obama’s conduct of foreign policy. If this is my idea of positive spin, what would the negative spin look like?
Assuming that racism is the central or overriding element behind this obsession, as Aziz does, is the easiest move in the world, but it is not necessarily accurate. It is a ready-made answer that in this case relies on a number of prejudices about Southerners, conservatives and attitudes towards race that are largely outdated, and it is an answer that fails to take account of the potency of political ideology, partisan attachment, and a particularly assertive, aggressive post-9/11 nationalism that took over much of the right in the last eight years. The insistence that Obama was born outside America, or that he must be in some way foreign, may be the only way for extreme Americanists to account for how someone born here and raised for almost his entire life in the U.S. could come to have views that they regard as un-American and anti-American. Those who have elevated the nation into a sort of church or religion, and those who are most attached to this kind of national idolatry, cannot abide the idea that the President–the secular high priest of their religion–believes what Obama believes (or, just as important, what they imagine he believes). For the Americanist, this is something like the abomination of desolation.
Filed under: ideology, politics
6 Responses to “The Americanist Heresy Revisited”
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I see the Flat Birthers as an offshoot of the modern politics of presidential personality. I’m not sure entirely when it started – the advent of television/JFK is my best theory – but politics in this country has come to be based about the president, his personality, his history, occasionally his policies, but most importantly, his party.
This took its most current form during the Clinton years, as his opponents moved from opposing his policies and attempting to defeat him in elections, to actively attempting to remove him as the legitimate president while he was sitting.
In the second set of Bush years, the Democratic personality-followers had it even easier. Dubious, too-close elections made it easy to claim that Bush was illegitimate, that he wasn’t actually the president in any way – Gore was.
The Birthers are a continuation of that. Without a close election to use to question Obama’s legitimacy, they’ve taken to questioning his birth. Remember also, for that brief day around the inauguration, when John Roberts’ line flub meant that Obama hadn’t actually taken the oath of office, and semi-jokingly, the personality-following Republicans claimed that meant he wasn’t really president.
It’s less an attempt to actually get rid of Obama (do they really want Biden?) and more of the mirror image of the liberals saying “he’s not MY president!”
mea culpa:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/08/apology-to-daniel-larison.html
The meaning of the words “racist” and “racism” in popular discourse have slipped so badly that I’ve come to expect any argument applying them as labels to be pretty muddle-headed.
Guess what Mitt Romney’s new book is going to be titled? “”No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” You can’t make these sorts of things up.
Rowan, I’m afraid I have to disagree again.
First, politics is always personality driven – especially in a system with a president. Wasn’t there a cult of personality around Andrew Jackson?
Second, there is absolutely no equivalence to outrage over Bush v. Gore and the Clinton/Obama haters. There was no aura of violence around angry Dems, and they received little, if any, institutional support from the Democratic establishment.
I’m sure there have been personality-driven politics before. Perhaps it’s more the nature of the change in celebrity. I’m not going to go crazy trying to determine when the cause was.
And I’m not saying that the Birfers are equal to liberals who thought Bush wasn’t elected. I’m saying they end up with a similar effect: a significant portion of the population has a reason (good or otherwise, institutional or otherwise) to believe that the President is not really the President.
What they do after that belief depends more on their political viewpoints than that they have the belief.