A Year Later, the Anti-Obamas Rise Again

It has been one year after the election of the black president, and his adversaries continue spreading extremist slogans. Who are these worrisome opponents the U.S. has been hearing a great deal from these past weeks?

“Barack Obama… is a traitor,” Mike Brady smiles, embarrassed. While he loves provocation, he is aware of the weight his words carry. However, he truly speaks his mind, affirming that “[Obama] is destroying our country, sweeping up the constitution to make the United States a socialist country. He already nationalized the automobile industry, now he wants the government to handle our health…that is not our country. We are a capitalist nation, not a socialist one. What he is doing is not American. ”

Mike and his wife Maria are angry and have been for a year. This quiet fifty-something couple that owns a printing business in Boiling Springs, a small South Carolina town, has not yet accepted the election of Barack Obama. They express their anger with the energy of the converted. In the 1970s, Mike let himself be swept up by the spirit of the times and their artificial paradise, and ended up in California. Today, this man with white hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache never starts a meal without first saying a prayer.

Maria, on the other hand, has recently converted to politics. Until Barack Obama’s victory, she was indifferent to what happened in Washington. “When he was elected, I understood something wasn’t right,” she blurts out, without a clear idea of the precise nature of the problem.

Maria is now catching up on the time she lost, spending her days watching Fox News or on her PC avidly reading the news published by the radical right. The slightest online rumor that lands in her inbox becomes a confirmation of the menace hanging over the country; proof Maria urgently forwards to the 4500 names that populate her contact list.

The “Patriotic Movement,” Incarnation of the Populist Right

Mike and Maria don’t intend to simply watch and do nothing. Since the spring, they have joined the “patriotic movement,” the incarnation of the most hard-core wing of the populist right in America. This family has more than one branch, from the religious right and the ultra-liberal economists, to the popularists who oppose all “elites.” Mike and Maria’s specialty? Organizing tea parties. These parties don’t include any cookies or English women elegantly sipping tea, but aggressive slogans and Americans parading the streets with raised fists.

On the colorful signs are three red letters depicting anger: TEA, for “Taxed Enough Already.” The expression is not just an acronym. It refers to a founding episode of the American Revolution, the Boston “Tea party” of 1773, when future Americans, refusing to pay a new tax on tea imposed by the British crown, threw the load, carried by three ships, overboard.

On April 15th of this year, Mike and Maria joined a national initiative and set up their very own “tea party” in Boiling Springs. To their amazement, two hundred people joined them. Fully encouraged, the couple continued their effort, participating in a march on Washington on September 12. Since then, they have organized the departure of nine buses heading to the nation’s capital. On each occasion, Mike the former artist, dresses up as an American from the colonial period, his way of underscoring the fact that patriotism is on his side. Alongside him, other angry men are wearing rather worrisome T-shirts, where Obama appears with the features of Hitler.

Racism is Present in this Dissenting Movement

As it has been barely nine months since Barack Obama’s investiture, many observers tend to see the “patriotic movement” as a marginal phenomenon, bringing together a few angry oddballs who seem to be harmless. Chip Berlet, a journalist and leftist activist who has been watching the activities and different faces of the American radical right over the past thirty years, doesn’t see it that way. “We are talking about a real mass movement,” he declares from his Boston office.

“A movement that is difficult to measure: no headquarters, no member lists…it’s very diffused and even their meetings lead to the eternal war of numbers. But from what I’m hearing, it represents a real phenomenon that is rapidly spreading.” According to the media, the march on Washington brought together tens of thousands of people. “Over one million,” according to the organizers.

In this dissenting movement, racism is present. But to what degree? It is probably not as much as we think. The real enemy, common to all these different groups, is the state. It is accused of all the ills of the world by an America frustrated with the financial crisis and the billions given to Wall Street.

This phenomenon is not new; populism has always been a political force in the United States. But today’s new technologies offer a formidable window to the most paranoid theories. For example, Fox News recently devoted four hours of prime time to reveal “internment camps” the U.S. government supposedly started building. It did this before concluding it was an unfounded rumor.

Contesting the Legitimacy of the American President

“This story is interesting,” Chip Berlet explains, “because this theory did not originate with Obama; it was already there in the 1990’s, [and] spread through the universe of militias, these armed, anti-government organisms present in certain regions of the country and in an increasing number at the start of the Clinton years. This is being recycled but it is spreading outside of these closed circles.”

Spreading all the way to Mike and Maria, for example, who believe this and see in it an additional confirmation that Barack Obama is a “fascist” or a “socialist”. Is he even an American? “We don’t know… nobody has seen his birth certificate,” blurts Maria, taking hold of a speech by the radical right that says the president was in fact born in Africa, and so is not a U.S. citizen, and therefore, not a legitimate president.

The fact is these theories aren’t so much an attack on Barack Obama’s politics as a questioning of his legitimacy. The images portraying Barack Obama as Hitler or Stalin, as absurd as they may be, create an unhealthy climate. In Greenville, at the heart of the most conservative region of South Carolina, Brother Jay Scott Newman, of the church of Saint Mary, puts things in perspective: “Crazy radicals, we do have. But they also exist in Europe. One shouldn’t pay them too much mind. I must remind you that the last two presidents who were targeted by violence were republican – Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.”

Chip Berlet is more worried. Not that he fears an attack on the president, who is very well protected, but rather an act of violence against a symbol of the state, such as the one that had targeted an FBI building in April 1995, killing 168 people. “I am not saying it’s going to happen,” he explains. “I’m only saying that the current climate and the anger of a minority of active Americans remind us of the situation after the arrival of Bill Clinton to the White House.”

Gilles Biasssette (in Greenville and Boston)