Halloween Politics

More than a year ago, the Obama candidacy became a real possibility after a spike in September 2007’s polls. Around that time, the mood was that though Obama’s run for President was, indeed, historic, it was too easy to say it portended the resolution of the race problem. That is, until the nastiness of the South Carolina primary made it clear there were white voters who felt otherwise. It’s true his proposals do not mark much of a change in federal policy toward racial equality. But neither does it do Obama historical justice to devalue the significance of this election’s rhetorical politics. The election of the first black President has sent shivers through the roots of the (more) conservative major party. This point seems obvious when you consider the paroxysms afflicting the neoconservative base:

The workings of this kind of vitriol in the political thought of, as Andrew Sullivan put it, the Palinites is not unfamiliar to those who have read between the lines of U.S. political discourse since Nixon. But what is uncanny—and I mean this in Sigmund Freud’s sense of the return of something repressed—is the frankness with which the Palinites articulate their political priorities in the language of racial conflict, the hoped-for rebirth of a “real American” heartland freed from the tyranny of the mongrel coastal metropolises. As if a political Halloween, replete with walking dead, these past weeks have disinterred the reanimated bones of conservative ideology. Thus the Repugnicans hurl accusations of socialism, communism, terrorism, and—mindblowingly—Judaism at a party they see as prying, at last, political hegemony from their cold, dead, white, Christian fingers: Representative Thaddeus McCotter’s (R-Mich.) invocation of Nazi ghouls represents the thrashes of a cornered Republican animal. I only hope this election will be remembered as the last gasp of a kind of thinking kept artificially alive through vampirism and violence.