Let’s take a walk through the theater of the absurd. Thanks to deranged folks at Fox News like
Bill O’Reilly, it’s not a very long or arduous walk.
We’ll start last summer, when President Obama, citing the
repeated failure of Congress to pass something like the very reasonable and
patriotic DREAM Act, instituted a program known as Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals. Under DACA, children
of people who came to the US without documentation can avoid the threat of
deportation as long as they meet certain requirements such as staying in
school, staying out of trouble with the law, etc. Conservatives cried “foul,” and claimed that
Obama was “pandering” to Latinos for political purposes, apparently hoping that
nobody in their audience would notice that pandering to anti-immigrant white
people looks equally undignified.
Fast forward. The
DACA program is a (limited) success, the sky didn’t fall, and Obama wins the
November election. Enter O’Reilly, who
grabbed headlines on election night lamenting that “it’s not a traditional
America anymore and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want
stuff. They want things.” (Read Jesse Hagopian's
wonderful take on this, please!) It
doesn’t take a Poly Sci major – though it might take some elementary level of
self-awareness – to recognize that people in O’Rielly’s “traditional” America
(read: straight, white, middle-class English-speaking Americans) want stuff
too. Stuff like tax cuts, less spending
on social programs, big defense contracts, property rights (to protect property
they own at least in part because of their historical status,) and lots of
tough-on-crime kinda stuff so they can feel oh-so-secure in their suburban
enclaves. Mostly, perhaps, they want to
feel like the stuff they want is somehow more legitimate than the stuff other
people want – stuff like a government that protects them from excessive
exploitation in the labor market, and guarantees some basic necessities for
living in a country that “enjoys” the widest gap in wealth and income
disparities in the developed world. That
kind of “stuff” is – in their minds – illegitimate, and they can only get it by
getting powerful politicians to pander to their
needs.
So far, I’m not sure this fits the definition of absurd –
just the painful ironies of our incredibly immature political dialog. But what strikes me as truly absurd was the
reminder I saw yesterday about what Bill O’Rielly’s preferred candidate in this
election said at the Republican National Convention only two months before. Mitt Romney told the delegates – and the TV
cameras, to be sure – “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of
the oceans and heal the planet…” He said to jeers. “My promise… is to help you
and your family.” How, Mr. O’Reilly, is a Presidential candidate promising to “help
you and your family” different from people wanting “stuff?”
The absurdity of this is the expanse of the hypocrisy;
but I’m wondering – again – if it’s not something more. I’m wondering again about this Jungian meme:
do conservatives really hate liberals so much simply because they (liberals)
remind them (conservatives) of themselves?
Even when they have to go to the extent to re-invent liberals in order
to provide a straw man for them to hate?
Mr. Romney’s own admission is that liberals care about things other than
themselves, things like oceans and planetary health; and his remarks also make
it clear that conservatives are actually proud
to not care about such things. (At least
in the “privacy” of their own conventions.)
By this logic, we can understand Mr. O’Reilly’s outrage as probably
actually directed at his own allies: Mr. Romney and the many other Republicans
who lost this election promising to deliver “things” to all those hard-working,
middle-class (read: white) Americans.
And so now we’re hearing that Republicans, praise the
Lord, are “softening” their hard-line stance on immigration reform. That’s a huge bet – that they can actually
convince the very people they’ve been so dismissive of all these years that Republicans can give them stuff, too.
Let’s call it liberal envy. And
don’t worry, Bill O’Reilly, I’m sure there’s a therapist that can help you.
