What's Really Behind The Town Hall Blitzers

Amanda Marcotte nails it:

I can’t recommend enough this video of Tim Wise being interviewed on CNN about the racism underlying the right wing freakout over health care:

Watching it, you realize that the debate “is this or isn’t this racism?” is lopsided. The side arguing “is"---increasingly, most liberals are getting it and thankfully, the mainstream media is starting to accept it---has research and history on its side. The side arguing “isn’t” is basically hoping that you feel bad enough about using a loaded word like “racism” that you’ll shut up, because it isn’t polite to call a racist racist. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t a matter of awkwardness based in unexamined privilege or unintentional racism. Those are the occasions, I suspect, that make people uneasy to use the word “racist”. The people here are, as Wise explains, are working under old-fashioned, obvious prejudicial beliefs. The one he names is “hard-working whites” vs. “lazy blacks”, and again, that they’re smart enough to try to dance around the issue to the cameras doesn’t mean that this stuff doesn’t come out in research or just when you’re a white person who gets behind closed doors with these folks.

Nailed it to the wall, frankly. To a lot of Americans, health care reform is simply The Big Welfare Giveaway To Minorities We Largely Expected From A Black President. They won't admit it, of course. But that's what the logic is. All the GOP has to do is give the issue political cover, an excuse like "death panels" or "government takeover of health care" and people sign on in droves, because of the inconvenience of admitting the truth.

Since I think about this issue all the time, I’d say that you could probably even narrow down which code words are more obviously racist than others. For instance, I tend to think that flinging around the word “socialism” is a lot more intentionally racist than priding yourself on being a Real American®. It’s a narrow distinction, but the former is intended to invoke images of non-white people living on the dole that you pay for. The latter is a racist term---since non-white people are automatically excluded from Real America® 99% of the time---but it’s also about imposing an ideological test, wherein you prove that you’re not Real America® by voting for Democrats, not waving 6 million American flags around, etc. I’m sure that you get kicked out of the Real America® club for shunning the fanny pack at this point. Calling Obama a “terrorist” or “Hitler” is overtly racist---Wise explains why the “Hitler” thing is in the video. All this is hair-splitting, but that’s what blogs are for, right? But the distinctions matter to Republican politicians. If you’re John McCain, for instance, you feel comfortable suggesting that your base are the only Real Americans®, because while the term is racist, it’s not as overtly racist as terms like “socialist” or “terrorist”.

Absolutely. The goal of the Republican Party right now is neo-Atwaterism: you can't use overt racial code words, so you invent new ones and invent new political cover stories to justify it. "Real America" is certainly one of them, as is "radical liberal", etc. The right-wing obsession with Obama's birth certificate and ACORN is also part and parcel of this mess.

All of this goes back to the fact there are millions of Americans who just can't handle the fact that A) we have a Black President and B) America has fundamentally changed enough that we voted for the guy.

Change can be scary. Scary enough apparently that people at these town hall meetings are saying things like this:

“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”

And I'm thinking there's enough of them.