It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.
Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren’t new, that their fear of “big government” is but the latest version of states’ rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy.
2008 Election Map (a screen shot I took on election night when I was comparing these maps):
1861 Free vs Slave State Map:
Mason Dixon line: intact, but fading. Again from The Root:
The sad, and tiresome, part is that we have to have that same damn conversation over and over again. We can take some comfort in the fact that part of the intensity we see from the vein-popping angry populism of the birthers and the tea-baggers, the Joe Wilsons and the Glenn Becks flows from a desperate recognition that they are on the losing end of a historic argument. Obama’s presidency is the checkmate against an ugly America that they want to preserve, but that they see fading not-so-slowly in the rearview mirror.
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