The America That Scares

A group on Facebook asks if Obama should be assassinated. Some protesters went to presidential visits armed. Some web sites cry, “Obama, Hitler.” Some media agitators, like Lou Dobbs on CNN, “doubt” the American head of state’s nationality.

The violence of the attacks thrown by the extreme right at Barack Obama has assumed a hallucinatory dimension. These harsh faces, those threatening fists, those brandished placards recall the incendiary sermons of the national Catholic and anti-Semitic priest Charles Coughlin against President Roosevelt at the end of the 1930s, the heinous hunting of racists by some “riders of liberty” in the deep South in the 1950s, the hysterical attacks against John and Robert Kennedy and those who stood behind Martin Luther King for the civil rights of blacks.

In the image of Léon Degrelle, who pretended to represent the “real country” and French Action by crying out against the “Jew Léon Blum,” the American far right presents itself as the “Real America,” and diminishes its opponents as invaders or infiltrators. Declaring itself “pure wool,” white and Christian, it drapes itself in the national banner and excommunicates those who are different. And it is all the more triggered by hate. However, the scope of the attacks targeting Barack Obama no longer reveals simply democratic uproar, but rather a call for murder.

This corresponds to other troublesome phenomena that are denounced by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), including the rate of racially-motivated attacks, particularly against Hispanics; the never-before-seen mobilization of some white supremacist groups, up 50 percent from 2000; the comeback of extreme right militias; the breakup of the stock of arms merchants and of munitions; and a 400 percent increase of death threats against Obama compared to those targeting George Bush.

The euphoria that won international opinion after the Democratic victory last November has almost made us forget that the part of America that was stubbornly opposed to Obama hasn’t been won over; that it was always there, furious, aggressive, venomous and incapable of accepting defeat.

This rancorous America is in the minority, but it is far from marginal because it is anchored in the heart of the Republican party, which is put under pressure by its own extremists. Moreover, some of its most disjointed arguments take advantage of a thundering media intermediary, not only in the wild, wild west of the internet, but also in the notable television channel that thinks of itself as respectable, like Fox News.

Stumbling and worried, this America continues to find the presence of a black in the White House wrong and it is on the path for war, behind the banner of war and trumpets of disgrace. Bring on the anti-Christ! Like Bill Clinton declared straight out, Obama faces a truly “vast right-wing conspiracy.” It is a conspiracy “inspired by racism,” noted former president Jimmy Carter. Nostalgic for the deep South and an apartheid society, this “white tribe” has all the more reason to be more brutal as it feels inexorably threatened by the interior and exterior evolution of the United States.

Its atavistic fears are fanned by a terrible feeling of powerlessness against the rise of “people of color.” According to numerous demographic projections, Americans of European origin will be a minority by 2050.

In this atmosphere of paranoid neuroses, each movement of Barack Obama in favor of reasoned multilateralism is decoded as treason. Denounced as a “foreign agent” by the most intense souls, the president is accused of collaborating with America’s enemies and even plotting with the U.N. to install a “world government.”

While most reappointed analysts see the multilateral diplomacy of Obama as the only way to guarantee maximum American leadership and consider the diversity of the population to be a trump card in a world that is increasingly multi-polar, the ideologues of the extreme right and their right and file tendency to cling to the illusion of an American omnipotence can only understand what is white and paleo-Christian.

The ultra-Americans have always had chauvinism on their lapels in order to better hide their own treachery. Some ghosts crop up, like the pilot Charles Lindbergh, leader of the American First movement, looking to prevent the United States from going to war against Hitler, or Joseph McCarthy passionately defending the S.S. responsible for massacring 80 American soldiers at Baugenz in 1944 at the battle of Ardennes, before becoming the grand inquisitor of the witch hunt.

Seen in this context, the preening populists, the hecklers at Obama’s meetings and the reminiscences of that “good ol’ time when the Negroes knew their place,” are those who not only contribute to besmirching the world image of the United States, but also compromise the capacity of their country to take up the challenge of deep and inevitable change.