the citizen-viewer

I had a rare opportunity to be around a group of conservative businessmen yesterday. They were gathered to hear a prominent conservative yakker hold forth on what’s wrong with Obama. The event was interesting for what it said about why they don’t like Obama.

The thesis of the night was a variation on what the McCain campaign puts out and what you can read in any of the right-wing welfare press. To wit, Obama’s supporters back him because of their unique and misguided cultural psychology, not for the issues and certainly not in reaction to what the Republicans have brought upon the nation.

Last night the master key on offer was white guilt. Whites support Obama because they don’t want to look racist, and Obama offers them absolution for their self-perceived sins. In this rendition of our national life the worst thing that can befall someone is to be labeled a racist. Worse than cancer? Getting run over? Arrested? Bankrupt? Sigh. But if you believe, then you believe. So to avoid being called racists we get Obama-mania.

The race argument runs through other conservative rationalizations for Obama’s popularity, such as Obama the pop star, Obama the man who reads others’ speeches well, Obama the charming young man at the country club (Rove’s idea), Obama the typical phony do-gooder demagogue.

Two premises are at work in the effort to dismiss the Democratic nominee as cultural phenomenon. First, it helps to take the sting out of him winning. “We lost to a rock star, not because people actually don’t like us.” Second, America has not changed a smidge since the tumultuous year of 1968 when Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” (hard working Americans) rose up to stop the rot brought on by liberal elitists, social engineers and angry black nationalist mobs. The culture war that 1968 epitomized is still, for the right, the emotional fulcrum on which their ideas balance.

My impressionistic evidence for this insight came from watching the audience get all slathery over the speaker’s discussions of ’60s liberals and how they have taken over myriad institutions by accusing their foes of political incorrectness; how Jesse Jackson “shakes down” corporate America; how a hard-working ordinary guy who happens to make a boatload of dough is always at risk of being sued for sexual harassment, racial insensitivity, making gay jokes, picking on the disabled, or any other innocent act taken out of context and turned into a witch hunt. That stuff got them revved up.

What’s going on around them, most notably the collapse of the financial markets, is just static.