Looking back, I think it was inevitable that we'd see this cultural instinct increase in intensity as a result of our having elected the first black President. But I think, also too, that a good deal of white tribalism, particularly among older and rural whites, was inflamed by the lack of jobs, the foreclosure crisis, the destruction of their pensions/401(k)s, etc. Economic malaise, in other words, and the quasi-Depression economy that descended upon a great swath of the country four years ago made a lot older white folks a lot more susceptible to the rhetoric of the usual grifters and demagogues who appealed to their deepest fears by connecting the dots between the unprecedented hardships they were now facing with the equally foreign-looking President who was running their government. For a lot of these people, it wasn't a hard sell.
Now, I'm not saying there would not have been some racist backlash accompanying the President's ascension, and there'd still have been some white folks who'd have swallowed idiot conspiracy theories, no matter what the President did---but I also think it was exacerbated, and made worse to some extent, by the administration's inability/unwillingness to fully grapple with the issues that caused these people the greatest anxiety: Jobs, money, and mortgage relief. More accurately, the lack of them. Yes, the Recovery Act was a commendable achievement, but the administration erred gravely in assuming it was a suitable policy fix in itself and not, as it should have been, a down payment on a Second New Deal.
The Affordable Care Act may one day turn out to be a transformative piece of legislation, but if it doesn't, I imagine we're going to look back on the administration's first year-and-a-half as a case of missed opportunities and misplaced priorities, where too much time and political capital were squandered on a major policy initiative which, however well intentioned, forced other more pressing and meaningful reforms to be delayed and deferred. Don't get me wrong, there will always be right-wing crackpots among us---I just suspect there would be fewer of them today if more of the scared old white folks in flyover country had good-paying jobs that allowed them to stay in their homes and enjoy a dignified retirement; if their communities weren't littered with abandoned homes; if their grown-up kids didn't have to move back in with them because they couldn't find work; and if they could watch financial criminals were being marched off to prison for embezzling their pensions. Then as now, it's the economy. It always is.
---Baron V
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