Republican Racism Will Be the Major Issue of the History of the Obama Administration

When the history of the Obama administration is written, the major issue will be how the Republican establishment, the media, the oligarchs, their properties in the congress and state governments, used blatant racism to weaken him and manipulate him.    While racism isn't the primary motive of many of those Republicans, it is their primary means to try to overturn two elections, the last one in which The American People gave Obama one of the most impressive electoral victories in modern history.  The ultimate goal of Republicans is to use the substantial percentage of the American population who hate black people and people of color as a political weapon.  

Unwisely, I believe, Obama has consistently weakened his position by refusing to confront the racists who have been emboldened by his attempts to make friends with them.  Part of that is his expectation that he could do with the racists in Congress and the media by making alliances with them, the means by which he won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review and worked with the Republicans in the Illinois Senate.   But it is certainly not the way that things have worked during his presidency.  Racism, bigotry has to be named and fought and you don't do that by pretending it's not there when it's blatantly declaring its presence.

One of the things we have learned from the Obama era is that for a considerable and dangerous group of Americans the worst part of the 19th century never ended. Their minds are as mired in the racism from that century, its slogans, its images, its attitudes, some of those in the updated cover Hollywood gave it, and they comprise the controlling minority of the Republican Party today.  The "sane," greed driven oligarchs are wedded to them because they allow them to take power during Republican administrations and to control politics through the insanity of their obsessive hate.   They are highly motivated by their hate and, as we are seeing with the government shutdown and the coming default, they are willing to go to any length to prevent the will of the non-racist majority from being made law.   They are the wider manifestation of the same fascism for which the Klu Klux Klan and the skinheads are the most devoted fanatics.  They are the "good Americans" and you should read that with the memory of the "good Germans" of the 1930s and 40s ringing in your ear.   They are extremely dangerous because the allow the extremists to gain power.  No faction of them is more culpable than the "free press" which has aided their power grab, which has not changed as their dangerousness became obvious and which still sees them as a means for corporate oligarchy to gain power and steal everything in sight, an extension of the Bush II regime.

A friend of mine who monitors right-wing websites tells me that the psychotics gathered on them are gleefully anticipating a real, shooting civil war to erupt with the default and the economic havoc which will result from it.   Thanks to the Roberts Court, the media and others who have allowed it, those psychotics are armed to the sky, when they start talking like that it is a serious warning that some of them really mean it.  I have no confidence that if a few of them start it that others of the group of racist gun nuts won't join in.  I have no confidence that some police wouldn't help them just as the police were involved with the KKK terror campaigns of the past.   While we have coddled fascists and Nazis under the "free speech" absolutist fad, they've been preparing to do just what they've always said they intended to do.  It might still seem unlikely that they could take over but who knows?   As the Oklahoma City bombing and a wave of individual hate murders have shown, they can kill lots of us even in the absence of overt political control. They have been conducting a low-level war against minorities, often with the participation of the police and the gun industry, the sponsors of "stand your ground" laws.  Lots of them take their models for action from the media, especially the movies.

Barack Obama represents the post-racist American society to lots of people, they will point to his impressive re-election numbers.  But reality doesn't come down to that kind of facile, sound-bite simplicity.  The use of Barack Obama by the oligarchs who use fascists to retain control of the country is what I see in the past six years, they have certainly made him into a weak president who can't do much that they don't want him to.  We are about to find out if this default will turn into racist politics last stand or if it will be something that most of us still like to believe is unthinkable.  We've put off thinking about that too long.