Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [57]
A Brief Interlude
The timing of the Reconquista outbreak, starting in 2006, is notable. Immigration had been all over the news in the 1990s, but on September 11, 2001, the nation’s gaze jerked suddenly from the south to the east. The attack on the World Trade Center, followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed fears of the Latino invasion from the front of most Americans’ minds. People became concerned about securing the nation’s borders not from illegal immigrants but from bombs and terrorists.
The terrorism fears that the right wing bathed in for the next five years had a substantial racist element for sure, but the “war on terror” is not a good example of persecution politics. First, the primary threat is external, not internal. The villainous masterminds embodied by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were foreigners. Local terrorist cells were represented as extensions of Al Qaeda’s power, just as Japanese Americans were seen as agents of the Japanese empire in the 1940s, and suspected communists were seen as Soviet tools in the 1950s. Second, there is actually a terrorism threat. Unlike secular humanists, gay recruiters, welfare queens, and reconquistadors, Islamic terrorists exist, and they conspire to attack the United States. While the threat has been repeatedly overblown, liberals have been accused of weakness, innocent Muslims have been demonized, and President Obama’s middle name has been repeated ad nauseam, there is no mainstream narrative of powerful American elites conspiring with radical Muslims to persecute white Christian conservatives through terrorism.
Even if George W. Bush had not been obsessed with Islamic terrorism, it is unlikely that he would have pushed a race-based persecution politics strategy. The nation’s obsession with welfare went into decline after the Clinton-Gingrich reforms in the 1990s. Bush and his political strategist, Karl Rove, saw Latinos as fertile recruiting targets, so they avoided anything that might antagonize them. Bush often emphasized his Spanish-language skills and his personal relationship with the Mexican president, Vicente Fox.
Pat Buchanan, meanwhile, shuffled about in the political wilderness, a lonely conservative voice muttering about Jewish neocons who colluded with Israel to ensnare the United States in a war that was not in the nation’s interest.77 By 2006, however, the U.S. had begun to shake itself loose from 9/11 fever. Color-coded threat levels had become background noise, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had become page six stories, Bush’s favorability ratings had swooned, and Democrats swept into Congress. From the right-wing fringes, persecution politics began to snarl and bay.
The Change We’ve Been Waiting For
The 2008 Republican primary was a study in immigration demagoguery. Just as George Wallace once vowed that he would not be “outniggered,” so did the eleven white men running for the Republican nomination compete to out-“illegal” each other.az They accused one another of giving scholarships and driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, of failing to secure America’s borders, of supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants, of employing Guatemalan gardeners, and of running sanctuary cities for illegal aliens (which sounds like the plot of sci-fi thriller District 9). After one immigrant bash during a Republican debate, the anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo declared, “All I’ve heard is people trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo.”ba78
And then there was Barack Obama. When Obama launched his campaign in 2007, the racist fringe went nuts of course, but the big conservative media stars approached with caution. Bill O’Reilly reported that white Americans were “terrified” that anything they said about Obama might be interpreted as racist condescension. Glenn Beck said that he didn’t have many African American friends because he was afraid