Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [1]
The much younger Rachel Maddow seemed bemused by Buchanan’s tirade. She dismissed his reproaches and replied with a half smile, “You’re living in the 1950s, Pat.”
But Maddow was wrong. For there was no affirmative action to speak of in the 1950s, and the notion that white people suffered from reverse discrimination did not become popular until the late 1970s. Moreover, Buchanan’s rhetoric about white victims has become all too common since the election of President Obama, whom right-wing stars like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have accused of racism against white people.2
A few days after the Maddow-Buchanan duel in July 2009, I wrote a blog post about a lawsuit over the national motto of the United States: In God We Trust. During my research for the article, I learned that the doctrine of separation of church and state is really a “liberal scam” to discriminate against Christians, who are apparently suffering from even greater oppression than America’s white males. Rush Limbaugh’s younger brother David explained the details in his 2004 book, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christians.3 Perhaps former representative John Hostettler (R-IN) read it. When Congress sought to curb abusive proselytizing in the Air Force Academy in 2005, he accused Democrats of “denigrating and demonizing Christians,” and fumed on the House floor, “The long war on Christianity in America ... continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage.”4
As I read about the long war on Christianity, with Buchanan’s rage against affirmative action still fresh in my mind, the parallels between accusations of white victimization and Christian persecution popped brightly out of the screen of my laptop computer. Liberal bloggers often mock conservatives’ “persecution complex,” but I had previously considered conservative complaints about mistreatment to be a reflexive gripe—like the line from “Charlie Brown” by the Coasters: “Why’s everybody always pickin’ on me?” But in July 2009, it suddenly occurred to me that the persecution accusations amounted to more than political grumbling; they represented key tactics in a pervasive, deep-seated political strategy by the right.
I had no idea how deep it sat.
As I burrowed backward in history, persecution narratives appeared like hidden patterns in the mosaic at nearly every critical moment in the evolution of modern conservatism, from the formation of the religious right to the rise of Fox News. At the same time, the present-day political scene in the fall of 2009 abruptly went mad. Tea Party protesters carried signs comparing Obama to Hitler as Glenn Beck warned of communist conspiracies at the highest levels of government. And everywhere that madness reigned, I found the thread of persecution paranoia winding though the mania.
I call this thread persecution politics. It is a rhetorical strategy to convince millions of white, heterosexual, Christian, conservative gun-owners that an evil conspiracy of liberal elites, black radicals, illegal immigrants, gay fascists, and other disturbing bad guys are taking away their rights, their guns, their health care, their freedom, their traditions, their children, and their favorite television programs. Blowing Smoke is the story of persecution politics—how it began, why it works, and what it has done to the country.
As you may have gathered from the title, this book does not attempt to present the kind of even-handed “liberals say-conservatives say” analysis so popular in the news media. While there are certainly plenty of liberal crazies running amok through the blogosphere, I do not believe that left-wing paranoia has attained anything