Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [124]
That makes it no less “troublesome,” however. The movement has proven both infectious and resilient. With each decade, the Republican Party has grown more conservative and its leaders more prone to demagoguery. Successive right-wing media stars have captured ever-larger audiences even as their messages have become more radical and more paranoid. Conservative grassroots campaigns keep getting bigger. Simply put, the growth of persecution politics is not slowing down; it is speeding up.
A New Class-Consciousness
The most disquieting aspect of the growth of persecution politics has been the formation of a new class-consciousness. In the last two chapters, I described how conservatives have sought to unify white Christian heterosexual blue-collar gun owners under the rubric of “conservatives,” “traditionalists,” and “real Americans.” Their primary instrument for fusing what are really disparate socioeconomic classes is the persecution narrative. A Pentecostal farmer from South Carolina may not have much in common with a Mormon plumber from Colorado, but according to right-wing mythology they are united in suffering deprivation inflicted by the liberal elites, black radicals, and so on. You could call them brothers-in-oppression.
The production of class identity through persecution narratives is not a new phenomenon, and it is not always malignant. Genuine victims of social repression have often formed social identities around historical suffering. Centuries of slavery and discrimination inform African American culture and identity, American Indians share a history of persecution by European immigrants, and Jewish identity developed under two millennia of oppression in Europe. The persecution narratives that underlie the identities of oppressed communities can actually have beneficial effects by empowering individuals to unite in a battle for equality.
But when a dominant majority fabricates persecution and projects hostility onto a vulnerable minority, it’s an entirely different story. In that case, the fantasies of persecution become rationalizations for discrimination or worse. Such rationalizations have contributed to some of the greatest horrors in modern history. Serbian national identity, for example, incorporates historical persecution by the Ottoman Turks two centuries ago. But the Ottomans are long gone, and Serbs dominated Yugoslavia’s political class and armed forces in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, during the Balkan Wars, Serbian leaders cited Turkish aggression as an excuse for slaughtering Bosnian Muslims. At his war crimes trial, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic called the violence “just and holy,” declaring, “There were fundamentalist goals to change the destiny and appearance of the whole region . . . Their aim was 100 per cent power, as it was in the Ottoman Empire.”dc3
Similarly, in the 1930s the Nazis stoked German nationalist sentiments by claiming persecution by Jews. Josef Goebbels wrote in 1932:
The Jew caused our problems, and lives from them. That is why we oppose the Jew as nationalists and as socialists. He has ruined our race, corrupted our morals, hollowed out our customs and broken our strength. We owe it to him that we today are the Pariah of the world.4
Such genocidal horrors are unimaginable in the United States, but right-wing leaders here have used identity politics to rationalize lesser forms of discrimination against minorities. George Wallace, for example, used the fantasy of Southern persecution by Washington elites to justify opposition to civil rights reforms. Likewise, conservative leaders from Anita Bryant to James Dobson have used the specter of Christian persecution to rationalize their opposition to civil rights protection for homosexuals.
The risk of discrimination is not the only problem. When a large portion of the population forms a class identity around perceived