The Hamburger Revolution: Crossroads

From the Department of the Painfully Obvious: Cliven Bundy is a racist, along with being a deadbeat millionaire, and lately a domestic terrorist.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

 

The only part of this passage that was remotely surprising was about abortion. Perhaps the rural bigots out West are a little different from the Midwestern variety, but having spent an inordinate and painful amount of time around the latter at various jobs I can say it is the lack of abortions and contraception that most sticks in their craw. Perhaps it has to do with population density?

"Freedom" Mr. Bundy keeps using that word, but one gets the feeling it means something very different to him than the way Merriam-Webster defines it. The idea of "having something to do" as freedom is about the only possible connection Bundy's rant on race could even tangentially have with his "war" on the Federal Government. You know, the one he refuses to recognize and whines is illegitimate.

It is truly delicious, reading the authoritarian right walk back their support for this "patriot" and Chez at Banter has been cataloguing all the ways these rats are abandoning their paunchy hero now that he touched the third rail. Left unsaid, of course, is why openly expressing the ignorant belief that all African-Americans should be lumped in with the problems that some individuals face is a bad thing, beyond common decency and all that silliness about "liberty and justice for all." Generalizations about an entire group of people are very tricky to make, educated professionals can sometimes draw conclusions about tendencies by running statistical analyses. But even in those cases the data can only find evidence of those tendencies. Why liberals and other rational, humane people shrink from generalizing about race, or sexual orientation, etc. is that the constant in the equation is inherent, people are born with dark skin or light skin, blue eyes or brown; they do not choose to do so. It is easier to generalize about beliefs and ideas, therefore you can get stronger correlations with ideology. Unfortunately, even with ideology you can get crossed wires. Take what Rachel Maddow presented last night:


We must first examine what Fox News is; at its core Fox is the propaganda arm of the Republican party. It's job is to elect republican candidates, defend them once in office, and undermine the Democratic party and liberalism by character assassination or guilt by association. Fox will therefore grab at any shiny object that fulfills this function, or appears to. Dr. Maddow exposed the lie that all right-wingers are in absolute lockstep, that there are people out there more disgusting than Sean Hannity. I was worried I would have to go all the way back to Bacon's Rebellion and the foundation of slavery in America to get where Dr. Maddow brought us. Phew!

So why is open racism, as espoused by Cliven Bundy, bad for Fox and the Republicans? Simple economics. The vestige of middle class America, safe from the world in their tucked away suburbistans and hanging on by their fingernails, forms at least a plurality of conservative voters. They like to believe they are above vulgar racism and shy away from open declarations such as Bundy's. Suburban conservatives and their even more remote cousins in exurban McMansions are the beloved demographic of advertisers, the Americans who have slightly more income than required for subsistence. I'll admit it looked like this bulwark of polite society seemed to have been overrun with the emergence of the tea party and its myriad racist appeals, but Fox did manage to gloss that over and pretend did not happen to reassure the skittish suburbanites who do not want to support an openly racist party. However, it keeps popping up.

Therefore, despite what Sean Hannity et al. may or may not believe personally they must take pains not to offend this group. Because billionaires and white trash do not an electoral coalition make. Also, it is hard to sell gold, cars, or "erectile dysfunction" pills to Walmart shoppers.