Read what Paul Krugman wrote today in his column “The Town Hall Mob,” and I’ll tell you why he’s wrong.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Actually this strategy of using racism and economic anxiety to fuel the fury of working-class whites has been around since the beginning. Back in the 18th century, wealthy colonists were sick of paying taxes to Britain and figured out that if they could get working-class whites to rally against England, they might be willing to die for independence. They were right. Sure it worked out OK for the working-class, but the elites made out like kings after England went away.
The US history is replete with stories of wealthy whites exciting working-class whites to fight to protect their positions of power. Slaveowners, fearing slave revolts, fueled the fires of racism to encourage working-class and poor whites to help keep slaves in check. A similar scenario was used to keep Native Americans at a safe distance from the powerful East Coast elites. I wrote about this a couple of days in a post referencing Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn writes:
We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries.
So while Krugman makes a compelling argument about the town hall mobs, I think it’s important to see just how old this tired strategy really is. It certainly didn’t begin with Richard Nixon – that’s too easy. The question is, will members of Congress and the People fall for it again? They usually do.
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A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
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