The GOP’s Rebel Yell

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Standing jubilantly before his subjects like a cartoon potentate, Newt Gingrich, the GOP’s resident court jester/sage/adulterer extraordinaire, declared Obama to be the most “radical” president in U.S. history at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Reveling in the event’s torch passing pageantry, the audience lapped up Gingrich’s tirade against the “secular socialist” Obama machine. Coming on the heels of Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s racist paean to Confederate pride (in which Southern honor was smote in a zip-a-dee-doo-da world without slavery or slaves), the conference issued another call to arms.

The RNC’s recent “party of family values’” peccadilloes notwithstanding, the past week has been very good for the GOP politically. Both liberal Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens and conservative Congressman Bart Stupak announced their retirements at a moment when white nationalist backlash is rapidly growing into a palace revolt. Stephens is the thin tissue between the far right judicial activist wing of the Supreme Court. His departure will spur another dogfight over the tenor of the bench and an Obama administration scramble for a palatable moderate. Stupak’s swift departure is an ironic end for a heretofore obscure legislator who saw his anti-abortion victory for the Religious Right rewarded with the junkyard intimidation tactics of the Tea Party.

During the health care deliberations, Stupak and his Blue Dog posse gave mainstream America a naked glimpse into the Capitol’s corrupt congressional machine. After all, it was Democrats who kowtowed to the insurance industry and caved on single payer and the public option. And it was Democrats who fought tooth and nail to trample a woman’s right to choose by making abortion a third rail deal breaker. So the charge that the Obama era signals a descent into radicalism would be laughable if it weren’t so insidious. In a rational universe, a review of the Obama administration’s policies thus far would yield universal approbation by conservatives. For example, by increasing troop deployments in Afghanistan Obama has fallen in lock step with the most hawkish Republicans’ imperialist claims on the Middle East. On the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the Obama administration’s tepid stance has barely deviated from that of the Bush administration. Obama’s recent backpedaling on offshore oil drilling should cheer his most reactionary critics and his inaction on climate change should bolster the growing chorus of flat earth troglodytes who believe global warming is a hoax. His campaign outreach to the Religious Right and his unswerving support of Bush’s faith-based initiative mark him as no sop for godless infidels. And his curt dismissal of the Congressional Black Caucus’ advocacy for specific policies to address the recession’s disproportionate impact on African Americans should have dispelled any lingering delusions that Obama would throw black America a bone.

Yet, like the little white boy who assailed Martinican psychiatrist-revolutionary Frantz Fanon with the reflexive "look, a Negro," white power will concede nothing to Obama's brokering for the ruling class. 'Secular' 'socialist' and 'big government' are now 21st century "code" words for the marauding black Other. And as the architect of the GOP's 1994 Contract with America Gingrich is chomping at the bit for a return to Old Glory. With Stupak and other retiring Democrats out of the picture, the prospect of a Republican midterm election sweep looks even more tantalizing. In draconian language much like the simple-minded rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Contract spelled out an agenda mandating limited government, low taxes and so-called personal responsibility, reinforcing race and class inequity in the “liberal” Clinton years. On April 15th the Tea Party will unveil a new “Contract From America,” a sprawling proposal purportedly generated from thousands of conservative survey participants that would provide newly elected legislators with a platform. Among the proposals is a demand to “Protect the Constitution by requiring each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.” Ostensibly aimed at Congress, this newfound right wing obsession with Constitutional integrity was never evident during the Bush years, when the administration criminally bucked constitutionality with illegal wiretapping, torture and preemptive wars. In its toxic mix of physical and rhetorical violence, the GOP/Tea Party is re-initiating middle America's masses into the time-honored best policy practices of the Confederacy —- namely, that the best “defense” is a white sheet offense.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

Mob Rules: Tea Party’s High Noon

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Back in 2009 when the first round of health care reform protests rippled across Middle America, open-carry gun fanatics set the tenor of the mob-ocracy to come; flaunting their weapons, exhorting white "patriots" to stockpile and evoking the specter of an Obama driven apocalypse. Now that the health care overhaul bill has passed the End of Days are upon us. During deliberations on the bill on the House floor a Republican lawmaker yelled “baby killer.” During a Tea Party protest in D.C. Congressman John Lewis was called the N-word and Congressman Barney Frank was lispingly labeled a “faggot.” At the same protest one enterprising man in the crowd hoisted a sign with the slur “Obama Plan, White Slavery” on it. After President Obama signed the legislation the offices of Democrats who supported the bill were vandalized.

Reveling in nightly PR infusions from the corporate lapdogs of American journalism, the freshly evangelized macho racist right has ensured that its charge of a socialist government expansion is now viewed as a “reasonable” critique of an overhaul that effectively concedes universal coverage to the insurance industry. Mining a deep strain of patriarchal backlash, the Tea Partiers have taken Christian fundamentalists’ language of “moral” panic and used it as a goad to a white nationalist uprising obsessed with imagery of enslavement.

The intersection of patriarchal resentment and so-called white cultural disenfranchisement has always animated conservative mass protest and activism. During the 19th and 20th centuries “white slavery” was the catch all term for moral panic about sex trafficking of white women. The association of the health care overhaul with this historical theme is a telling glimpse into the mind of the macho racist for whom sexual invasion is a metaphor for the imperiled white body as Nation. The specter of “enslaved” white people under the yoke of a black patriarch (ala the lawmaking blackface grotesques of Birth of a Nation) elicits visceral terror amongst white supremacists. True to their Confederate provenance, the Tea Partiers have begun to rally more vociferously for a return to States Rights. Before the ink was dry on the health care bill, 14 states lined up to contest its mandate that individuals’ purchase health care coverage. Back in February, during the Tea Party’s first convention, States Rights was the clarion call, with seminars on nullification—States Rights as trumping federal authority—and the heroism of Confederate president Jefferson Davis whipping up a secessionist frenzy.

Hijacking Christian fundamentalist propaganda, the Tea Partiers have succeeded in casting the “incursions” of the federal government as a grave moral transgression. In the misogynist hysteria over federal funding for abortion it did not matter that the Hyde Amendment was unequivocal on funding restrictions for the procedure. And in the thuggish sound and fury over “socialism” it did not matter that the final health care bill merely opened the gateway for competition amongst health care insurers, rather than single payer or even a public option. So-called nationalized health care is an affront to white Americans’ god given right not to subsidize minority leeches who exploit decent taxpayers with abortions, drug abuse treatment and emergency room visits.

Progressive organizations such as the Color of Change and Move On.org have called on GOP leaders like Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele to publicly denounce the Tea Party violence. Fat chance when the GOP is all but stage managing the Tea Party “movement.” Cruising into the midterm elections House Negro Steele and the GOP operatives are no doubt licking their chops at the media blitz, banking on Independent voters’ “buyers’ remorse” to sweep Obama and his health reform allies out of office. Playing Orwell’s O’Brien to Middle America’s Winston Smith from the novel 1984, the GOP knows that it can hold up four fingers and seduce the white electorate into believing there are five.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming Moral Combat: Black Atheism, Gender Politics and Secular America.