It's A Psycho-Birther Freakout

Frank Rich analyzes the Birther movement and comes up with a diagnosis that readers of ZVTS will be familiar with: there's a healthy chunk of the American population (particularly in the South) that is simply not capable of accepting minorities in positions of power, influence, and authority, and that some in the Village are going along with it as well.

Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust — we don’t know that Crowley is a racist — but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.

What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.

What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.

Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.

It’s against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre “birther” movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.

Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.

And Rich is absolutely right. There really are Two Americas (to borrow a phrase), one where the reality is a black man is President, and the other where the reality is he's not, where his authority, power, and influence is simply not recognized as valid.

If you're capable of deluding yourself to that point in order to invalidate Barack Obama's legitimacy as President, then you're capable of a great many acts of reducing minorities as a whole to the status of invalid: invalid as authority figures, invalid as having rights, even invalid as being human.

And once you reach that level of delusion, you're then capable of a great many acts of hatred and anger...even of violence. This of course is my real fear, that as these idiots on FOX and other media outlets continue to stoke this hysteria that it will reach some sort of critical mass, and explode into something much darker and much more violent. The more it is fed, the larger it becomes, and the more likely it is to spiral out of control.

Eventually America is going to have to confront this head on and deal with it. But if anything, the last month or so has shown us that there are millions of Americans who aren't even close to being able to deal with this happening in their lifetimes yet.

We have a long, painful road ahead of us all. Pray it is not a road soaked in blood, as way too often this path has been in the past.

[UPDATE 11:41 AM] Via Steve Benen, the mathematical breakdown of last week's Daily Kos poll shows that white Southerners overwhelmingly have doubts about Obama's origins.

So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president’s citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama’s citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South’s “don’t know” number to 30 percent and it’s “born outside the United States” number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn’t know where Obama was born.

One thing to keep in mind, if only a quarter or a fifth of white Southerners believe Obama was born in the United States, that’s more than voted for him last year in some states. Obama won 14 percent of the white vote in Louisiana, 14 percent in Mississippi, and 10 percent in Alabama.

Food for thought.