The Rage Won't End on Election Day
By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: October 17, 2010
CARL Paladino began his New York gubernatorial campaign by bragging he'd
"clean out Albany with a baseball bat." When an ally likened his main Albany
target, the (Jewish) leader of the State Assembly, to "an antichrist or
Hitler," he enthusiastically endorsed the slur. We also learned of
Paladino's
repertory of gag e-mails - among them a pornographic picture of a woman
having sex with a horse and a photo of an African tribal ritual captioned
"Obama Inauguration Rehearsal." How blind we were not to recognize that his
victory in a Republican primary under the proud Tea Party banner was
inevitable.
A week ago New Yorkers were presented with a vivid reminder of how a bat can
be used as a weapon. A pack of young thugs was charged with torturing three
men in the Bronx for being gay, one of whom, The Times reported, was
sodomized with "a small baseball bat."
It's probably safe to assume that no one in this lynching party has heard of
Paladino. Presumably he has heard of them, but a man of Tea Party principles
will not compromise, no matter what may be happening in the real world.
Don't
tread on Carl! And so last Sunday, as the city was reeling from both the
Bronx bloodbath and the earlier leap of a bullied gay Rutgers freshman off
the George Washington Bridge, Paladino visited a fringe Orthodox synagogue
in Brooklyn to stand his ground. He attacked gays for supposedly plotting to
brainwash children into accepting the validity of homosexuality.
We don't know what will happen on Election Day, but one fairly safe bet is
this: Paladino will not be the next governor of New York. However tardily,
he's been disowned not only by the state's extant, if endangered, cadre of
mainstream Republicans but even by some of the hard right. No one apparently
told him that while bigotry isn't always a disqualifier for public office,
appearing on YouTube vowing to "take out" a reporter from Rupert Murdoch's
New York Post can be. As a rule, it's career suicide to threaten to murder
your own political base.
But if New Yorkers may take comfort from the pratfall of this particular
barbarian at their gate, the national forecast is not so sunny. Paladino is
no anomaly in American politics in 2010. He's just the most clownish
illustration of where things have been heading for two years and are still
heading. Like the farcical Christine O'Donnell in another blue Northeastern
state, he's a political loss-leader, if you will, whose near-certain defeat
on Nov. 2 allows us to indulge in a bit of denial about the level of rage
still coursing, sometimes violently, through our national bloodstream.
That wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy's
collapse and Barack Obama's ascension. The mood has not subsided since. But
in the final stretch of 2010, the radical right's anger is becoming less
focused, more free-floating - more likely to be aimed at "government" in
general, whatever the location or officials in charge. The anger is also
more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral
damage. This is a significant and understandable shift, if hardly a salutary
one. The mad-as-hell crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic
recovery on the horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.
The rage was easier to parse at the Tea Party's birth, when, a month after
Obama's inauguration, its founding father, CNBC's Rick Santelli, directed
his rant at the ordinary American "losers" (as he called them) defaulting on
their mortgages, and at those in Washington who proposed bailing the losers
out. (Funny how the Bush-initiated bank bailouts went unmentioned.) Soon
enough, the anger tilted toward Washington in general and the new president
in particular. And it kept getting hotter. In June 2009, still just six
months into the Obama presidency, the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith broke
with his own network's party line to lament a rise in "amped up" Americans
"taking the extra step and getting the gun out." He viewed the killing of a
guard by a neo-Nazi Obama hater at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington as the apotheosis of the "more and more frightening"
post-election e-mail surging into Fox.
The moment passed. Glenn Beck, also on Fox, spoke for most on the right when
he dismissed the shooter as a "lone gunman nutjob." Those who showed up with
assault rifles at presidential health care rallies that summer were
similarly minimized as either solitary oddballs or overzealous Second
Amendment patriots. Few cared when The Boston Globe reported last fall that
the Secret Service was overwhelmed by death threats against the president as
well as a rise in racist hate groups and antigovernment fervor. It's no
better now. In a cover article last month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that
the magazine's six-month investigation found that "the threat level against
the president and other government targets" is at its highest since the
antigovernment frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh's bombing of a federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
While Obama-hatred remains a staple of the right, the ebbing of his
political clout may have diminished him as a catchall for America's roiling,
inchoate rage. The president is no longer the sole personification of evil.
For those who see government as Public Enemy No. 1, other targets will do,
potentially some as remote from Washington as Oklahoma City.
Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who has written a new book on
Beck, has been tracking the case of Byron Williams, a bank robber on parole
who injured two California Highway Patrol officers in a July shootout.
Williams was out to start a revolution, his mother said, because "Congress
was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items." But instead of
picking Congress as his target, Williams was gunning for progressives closer
to home, at the Tides Foundation and A.C.L.U. in San Francisco. The Tides
Foundation? It's an obscure nonprofit whose agenda includes education and
AIDS prevention. But it's not obscure to Beck fans, who heard him single it
out for vilification 29 times in the 18 months before Williams grabbed his
gun.
As Milbank has written, "it's not fair to blame Beck for violence committed
by his fans," but he would nonetheless "do well to stop encouraging
extremists." The same could be said of the many politicians who are
emulating the Beck template - especially given the tinderbox state of the
nation. Whether it's Sarah Palin instructing her acolytes to "reload" or a
congressman yelling "baby killer!" at a colleague on the House floor or
Sharron Angle, the Tea Party senatorial candidate from Nevada, proposing
that citizens consider "Second Amendment remedies" to "protect themselves
against a tyrannical government," we know where this can lead.
Even Paladino's short, crumbling campaign can take credit for a share of the
real-world damage in New York's civil war over the "ground zero mosque" this
summer. His television commercials calling the proposed Islamic center "a
monument to those who attacked our country" helped push his primary campaign
over the top, noticeably raising the city's temperature. The fever peaked
not quite three weeks after his ads first appeared, when a passenger slashed
a New York cab driver in the face and throat simply because he was a Muslim.
Paladino's fanning of Islamophobia was common among his national political
brethren this summer. Equally common was the violence against Muslims and
mosques that ensued, whether in Tennessee, Texas or California. Paladino's
antediluvian brand of homophobia is also making a comeback, from O'Donnell,
who has called homosexuality an "identity disorder," to Carly Fiorina, the
Senate candidate in California whose campaign is allied with the National
Organization for Marriage, notorious for its fear-mongering horror-movie ads
portraying same-sex marriage as the apocalypse. Two weeks ago, Jim DeMint,
the South Carolina senator who serves as the G.O.P.'s Tea Party kingmaker,
reiterated his desire to ban openly gay schoolteachers. Michele Bachmann,
Tea Party doyenne of the House, refused to condemn Paladino's homophobia
when asked about it last week on the "Today" show. As Stephen Colbert
observed last week, after the G.O.P. repudiated a Congressional candidate in
Ohio for wearing an SS uniform, the only line you can't cross as a
Republican is dressing as a Nazi. (Though, as Colbert added, "dressing the
president as a Nazi" is O.K.)
Don't expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside magically
after Election Day - no matter what the results. If Tea Party candidates
triumph, they'll be emboldened. If they lose, the anger and bitterness will
grow. The only development that can change this equation is a decisive
rescue from our prolonged economic crisis. Not for the first time in
history - and not just American history - fear itself is at the root of a
rabid outbreak of populist rage against government, minorities and
conspiratorial "elites."
So far neither party has offered a comprehensive antidote to our economic
pain. The Democrats have fallen short, and the cynics leading the G.O.P.
haven't so much as tried. We shouldn't be surprised that this year even a
state as seemingly well-mannered as Connecticut has produced a senatorial
candidate best known for marching into a wrestling ring to gratuitously kick
a man in the groin.
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