Third World America - Arianna Huffington [32]
While it’s important that we take the threats and the rage seriously, it’s just as important that we don’t ignore the legitimate anger being directed at Washington and the political establishment of both parties. Thanks to the botched bank bailout, anti-government rhetoric has pervaded the public conversation. “Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics,” wrote Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, “yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.”140
“There are times—they mark the danger point for a political system—when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing,” wrote historian Ian Kersaw.141 Maybe that explains the lackadaisical, going-through-the-motions response of the political establishment to the rising chorus of middle-class anger.
In times of economic upheaval, when people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, and feeling powerless to do anything about it, people have always looked for scapegoats. We’ve seen this over and over again throughout American history.
For example, in the 1880s, as the post–Civil War Gilded Age came to an end, a severe economic crisis began that culminated in the depression of 1893.142 But the search for scapegoats among the American people began early. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration from China, after Chinese immigrants had just helped build the transcontinental railroad.143 Attacks on the Chinese by white mobs took place all over the country.
One newspaperman captured the mood of the times: “Why permit an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress-blasting Asiatics befoul our thoroughfares, degrade the city, repel immigration, drive out our people, break up our homes, take employment from our countrymen, corrupt the morals of our youth, establish opium joints, buy or steal the babe of poverty or slave, and taint with their brothels the lives of our young men?”144
An ancestor of Glenn Beck’s, perhaps?
Then, as now, the agitation resulted in the formation of a loose political party—the Populists.145 Here is how historian Richard Hofstadter described their agenda: “The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not the future,” he wrote. “The Populists looked backward with longing to the lost agrarian Eden.” Sound familiar? The myth of a golden age in America that existed before all our current problems existed has fueled many a political campaign.
Hofstadter also pointed to the Populists’ rigid us-versus-them view of the world. It was the masses against the elites. Or, as Sarah Palin would put it, real Americans versus everybody else.
Conspiracy theories were rampant in the nineteenth century as well.146 In the wake of the depression of 1893, the Populists saw postwar American history as a “sustained conspiracy of the international money power,” an obsession that also played into a virulent anti-Semitism.
History shows that such unconscionable credulity becomes much more ominous in times of economic hardship. It becomes even more heightened when our politicians, leaders, and members of the media pander to it, rather than addressing the underlying causes. While the shameful internment of Japanese citizens during World War II is well known, many Americans remain unaware that during the Great Depression, the United States, under President Hoover, actually deported large numbers of American citizens of Mexican ancestry.147
As for anti-Semitism during the Great Depression, it wasn’t just angry rhetoric—it was acted upon. In 1935, for example,