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-- What Right Wingers Mean When They Call Obama A "Socialist"
What Right Wingers Mean When They Call Obama A "Socialist"
well,,,,,, someone has to say it
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| Right-wing attempts to paint Barack Obama as a socialist aren't just disingenuous. They're rooted in a history of conservative smears against black leaders. Adam Serwer | October 13, 2008 | web only On Saturday, Georgia Congressman John Lewis went nuclear on John McCain, releasing a statement that seemed to compare McCain to segregationist George Wallace. "George Wallace never threw a bomb," Lewis wrote. "He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights." The civil rights icon continued, "Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama." Lewis accused McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of "sowing the seeds of hatred and division." He was referring to the angry tone of recent McCain rallies, where cries of "kill him" and "off with his head" have made many people anxious about the potential for violence against the Democratic nominee. It's no wonder that the tone at McCain rallies remind Lewis of the bad old days. In recent months, conservatives have sounded increasingly retro with their attempts to paint Obama as a socialist or communist. In some ways, this accusation is typical far-right boilerplate. Obama certainly isn't the first Democrat running for president to be accused of communist sympathies. And as usual, the accusations are rarely linked to policy specifics. But the difference with Obama is that, in the eyes of the right, it's not just his political affiliation that implicates him as a socialist. It's his ethnic background. The hysterical accusations of socialism from conservatives echo similar accusations leveled at black leaders in the past, as though the quest for racial parity were simply a left-wing plot. Obama may not actually be a socialist or communist, but his election would strike another powerful blow to the informal racial hierarchy that has existed in America since the 1960s, when it ceased being enforced by law. This hierarchy, which holds that whiteness is synonymous with American-ness, is one conservatives are now instinctively trying to preserve. Like black civil-rights activists of the 1960s, Obama symbolizes the destruction of a social order they see as fundamentally American, which is why terms like "socialism" are used to describe the threat. This phenomenon extends beyond Obama's candidacy. The conservative explanation for the mortgage crisis falls neatly into this narrative, too; the country is at risk because Democrats allowed minorities to disrupt the natural social order by becoming homeowners. Never mind that this defies all data, logic, and history, the narrative resonates because it allows Obama, a living symbol of black folks rising above "their station," to become a focus for conservative economic anxieties. Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to "socialism" and "communism" as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X as written by Alex Haley, Malcolm recalls being confronting by a government agent tailing him in Africa, not long after his pilgrimage to Mecca. The agent was convinced that Malcolm was a communist. Malcolm spent years under surveillance because of such bizarre suspicions. Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover spent years attempting to link Martin Luther King Jr. to the communist cause. King, for his part, welcomed everyone who embraced the cause of black civil rights, regardless of their ideological ties. This included communists and socialists, but the idea that a devout man of God like King saw black rights as a mere step in a worldwide communist revolution was absurd. Malcolm was a conservative. King was a liberal. To their enemies, they were simply communists. The feeling that black-rights activists were part of a front for communism and socialism was widespread. Jerry Falwell famously criticized "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations." Falwell charged, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed." For the agents of intolerance, things haven�t changed much. On October 9, a McCain supporter told the candidate that he was angry about "socialists taking over our country." McCain told him he was right to be angry. The right wing continues to link the fight for black equality with socialism and communism. At the website of conservatism�s flagship publication, National Review, conservatives like Andy McCarthy argue whether Obama is "more Maoist than Stalinist," and National Review writer Lisa Schiffren explicitly argued this summer that Obama must have communist links based on his interracial background. Schiffren mused, "for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics." This conclusion is one she shares with Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, who declared that "amalgamation is ultimately the goal of the Communist element." (To be fair, these conclusions make a bit of sense: could there be a more perfect vessel for a secret communist takeover of the United States than a biracial one-term senator from Chicago with an Arabic-sounding name? At a Starbucks somewhere, Chairman Mao is leeching WiFi for a quick instant message to William Ayers: "It�s happening exactly how we planned it.") McCain, a child of privilege who spent the late 1960s in a Vietnamese prison camp, may simply be unaware of the feelings and historical context he has evoked through his campaign�s rhetoric. When Sarah Palin accuses Obama of "palling around with terrorists" and suggests that Obama hates his own country enough to wish it violence, the McCain campaign fuels age-old paranoia built around the conflation of black rights and the radical left. As for McCain himself, his attempts to tamp down the vitriol of his crowds suggest that he is somewhat confused by their response. He wants voters to dislike Obama, but he seems unaware of just what he has unleashed. However, by implicitly invoking the idea that Obama represents a socialist takeover of the United States, McCain is inviting what can only be a rational response from those who would die for their country: violence. What else is a patriot to do when freedom is threatened? Especially when their fears have been validated by no less authoritative a source than the Republican nominee for president of the United States? John McCain is no George Wallace, and a direct comparison may not be what Lewis intended. Rather, Lewis was expressing concern that the McCain campaign�s rhetoric could lead some of their supporters to conclude that violence is the only rational response to an Obama victory. (This is essentially the position staked out by the Obama campaign, which both rejected the Wallace comparison and remained critical of the "hateful rhetoric" at McCain rallies.) A veteran of the 1968 civil-rights march with Dr. King across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, John Lewis has the kind of credibility on mob violence that John McCain has on torture. We should listen to him very carefully. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles...right_after_all |
I don't know if I'd call him a socialist per se but his rhetoric sure does have a lot of socialistic undertones to it.
As far as Biden is concerned, I have little doubt that he's just another part of the globalist movement and that's something I found evident when I read portions of his 1992 speech which I believe has since been entitled "On the Threshold of the New World Order: A Rebirth for the United Nations."
i sometimes wonder if these people would more readily adopt a Western European model approach to political policy than what has made this country so great in the past. does that make me a racist or does that only apply to black people that share the same view?
Malcolm X was, in fact, towards the end of his life a socialist. his embracing a milder black nationalist approach through Islam naturally drew him to prefer a socialist model of government over a capitalistic imperial one.
MLK was a registered Republican as were most black Americans since the Abolitionist movement. remember the abolitionist movement was started by a bunch of "right wing fundamentalist wing-nuts" to use a popular modern epithet people love to use here so frequently.
to paint all modern conservatives as racist spawned from the ilk of J. Edgar Hoover is not only "disingenuous" but patently absurd and insults my intelligence.
we accuse people of espousing socialist points of view not because of the color of their skin but because they espouse a socialist point of view.
if i ever read an article that was premised strictly on the "politics of fear" this would definately be one.
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| Originally posted by Q5echo |
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| Originally posted by Krypton Um, abolitionists were liberals, for lack of a better word... |
yeah, find a better word. 
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i sometimes wonder if these people would more readily adopt a Western European model approach to political policy than what has made this country so great in the past. |
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| Originally posted by George Smiley The test of what makes a country "great" or not (or successful) is not the amount of money the top 1% of the population can steal from everybody else... |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i agree. it's actually the ease one can get to that 1% that i think makes a country great compared to other countries. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i agree. it's actually the ease one can get to that 1% that i think makes a country great compared to other countries. |
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| Originally posted by George Smiley That's a complete myth and IF true would mean dictatorships are "greater" than America... |
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X The thing he doesn't seem to get is that most of that 1% are trans-nationals and don't necessarily hold so much of a real allegiance to our country as they do to their other 1%'er friends. The political climate could be total despotism and those people would still be living well under a dictator's rule because they are the ones who own all of the banks and all of the world's infrastructure. Many of their families didn't even get there by Capitolism so much as they did Monopolism so to me they're just bloodlines of immensely wealthy scoundrels bent on subjugating the rest of us for their own sadistic desires. |
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| Originally posted by George Smiley Good job you qualified that sentence with "in the past" as today, your "great" country has caused the worst economic collapse since, erm, your country last caused the worst economic collapse. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo assuming your'e right, i think you may be overestimating that 1% of wage earners. according to 2005 US stats (the latest i can find at the moment) the top 1% of wage earners begins at around the $350,000 per year mark. i think you may be refering to the top .01% |
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X I mean the top 1% of overall income. Most of the people that I know who are extremely wealthy don't rely on wages. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo which is a complete myth? my standard for what makes a particular country great? which was really more of a response to your suggestion that its not the amount of money the top 1% of the population can steal from everybody else. or was it the fact that it's so much more possible here to reach your financial goals whether that be wanting to be in that 1% bracket or some other arbitrary percentage? |
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| look George, i never said my country is/was the "greatest". i don't even pretend to know how to either quantify a statement like that or qualify it. |
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| i realize you probably hate my country |
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| outright socialism isn't going to fix her faults nearly as much as it would diminish her strengths. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i'm sorry but aren't income and wage essentially the same thing only on different time scales? you mean top 1% of overall worth? i'm just trying to understand you thats all. edit> you're right (i'm not sure about the trans-national thing) i was getting confused. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo yeah, find a better word. youre saying Quakers were liberal? Abolitionist, in Europe and elsewhere, saw slavery as a moral afront to God. it was as simple as that. fundamentalist who already saw the Church of England as the corrupt hand of the King saw the slave trade as a sin and the Church's involvement in the trade an abomination. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i sometimes wonder if these people would more readily adopt a Western European model approach to political policy than what has made this country so great in the past. does that make me a racist or does that only apply to black people that share the same view? Malcolm X was, in fact, towards the end of his life a socialist. his embracing a milder black nationalist approach through Islam naturally drew him to prefer a socialist model of government over a capitalistic imperial one. MLK was a registered Republican as were most black Americans since the Abolitionist movement. remember the abolitionist movement was started by a bunch of "right wing fundamentalist wing-nuts" to use a popular modern epithet people love to use here so frequently. to paint all modern conservatives as racist spawned from the ilk of J. Edgar Hoover is not only "disingenuous" but patently absurd and insults my intelligence. we accuse people of espousing socialist points of view not because of the color of their skin but because they espouse a socialist point of view. if i ever read an article that was premised strictly on the "politics of fear" this would definately be one. |
Most people don't even know what socialism means, and that includes the vast majority of americans.
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| Originally posted by DJ Shibby You're attempting to paint your own history here that is contrary to the history that occurred. The Ring-Wing Fundamentalist Wing-Nuts have ALWAYS been against positive progress; just because the name of their party was flipped does not mean they were the patron saints of civil rights. |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by George Smiley
Both I guess. My original comment was aimed at you saying how "easy" it was for people to move into the top 1% of the population (in terms of wealth and power) in America compared to other countries. I don't think it is particularly easy in any country, in fact, it is practically impossible unless you are born into wealth. It's a complete myth that it is easy to do so simply by being "entrepreneurial". This is the American Dream that the power elite in America use to trick the population that the economic model which gives them all their power and wealth from everybody else is somehow open to new members if you work hard enough - it isn't]
best quote I've seen in awhile on here. The class divide in the United States is just as bad as in any other country, if not worse in some ways.
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| Originally posted by Q5echo apparently you missed what i was trying to say. the article wanted to paint modern conservatives in a way that was completely irrelevant to history. if you want to dispute the historical references i made about Malcolm X, MLK or the abolitionist movement be my guest, but youre going to need to bring more than just a contempt for Christianity because what your definition of "positive progress" doesn't mean anything else but what you consider positive. nothing more. |
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| Originally posted by DJ Shibby Of course I "want to dispute" your historical references. |
It's pretty funny how subjective the smearing is. If only the Dems had labeled Bush a Nazi in 2000..
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| Originally posted by {b.s.e.} It's pretty funny how subjective the smearing is. If only the Dems had labeled Bush a Nazi in 2000.. |
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