The Lion and Gun

In modernity, scholars tell us, identity is often constructed in opposition to an 'other' -- an 'us versus them' mentality that makes clear what we are by showing ourselves to be different from them. This is exacerbated by conflicting loyalties, isolation, dislocation, economic stagnation, alcohol and drug abuse and secularization and political corruption and the break-down of the traditional family unit -- all those things, in other words, that separate our present and our future from our past seen through a glass darkly: what we believe we were and aren't but ought to be. It becomes ever more important to find some stranger in our midst, someone who we aren't, someone to blame.

There's no great intellectual innovation in placing these uncertainties at the root of some Americans' often irrational and usually misplaced fears: of blacks, intellectuals, immigrants, liberals, foreigners, and so on. I think Richard Hofstadter (to say nothing of Thomas Frank -- or, for that matter, Barack Obama in a certain infamous meeting with San Francisco donors) oversimplifies when suggesting that the entire weltanschauung of poor white America can be explained by status anxiety or the failure of liberal politics. Nevertheless, it seems clear that there is a certain segment of America that holds a seething hatred for another segment of America, and that in this election Sarah Palin and, improbably, John McCain have come to represent the former while Barack Obama has become a talisman of the latter.

This is how we begin to understand the anger being unleashed right now at McCain's and Palin's rallies. Conflating the Democrat with effete intellectuals from that 'other' America has long been a fruitful strategy for Republicans, but now we're approaching what looks like a perfect storm: a President who for eight years has worked his conservative base into a lather; a potential President who is a cerebral northern urban Harvard black man with an Arab name; wars with Arab and Afghan 'others' seven years after deadly and fearful attacks on America; a movement threatened with spending a few cycles, maybe as much as a generation, in the political wilderness; and now -- the tip of the sword -- thinly-veiled accusations in the form of political rhetoric that Barack Obama is a terrorist sympathizer (if not a terrorist himself). The McCain campaign is playing on the minds of people who read those emails and still believe Obama's Muslim; it's knowingly turning him into a Manchurian candidate before these people's eyes. Republican operatives and conservative 'intellectuals' are casting it as patriotic duty to prevent Barack Obama from assuming the Presidency. They are, in short, harnessing all of the anger and fear and frustration of millions of people and directing it at this single man.

They're unleashing a dangerous and unpredictable force. McCain rallies are looking more like Nuremberg by the day -- the fervor, the leader-worship, the undirected anger. America is not Germany in the 1920s, and McCain's not about to whip the crowds into a pogrom. But it's reasonable to fear that at least one person will be driven to violence.

One person is enough.

Read more about this in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico. Obama's response to the anger unleashed at McCain rallies can be seen at Talking Points Memo.