The Chris Moeller Archives

The fear behind the bravado

The racist attacks against “the Squad”-- Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, were punctuated by a new one this week from the president against Elijah Cummings and his constituents in the city of Baltimore. It speaks to the new desperation in the motive. Senator Rand Paul, who is, himself, a reliable critic of U.S. foreign policy, chose a Breitbart-sponsored youth summit in Washington, to curiously attack Omar for her supposed disloyalty and ungratefulness to the nation because she dared to offer her own critiques of it. He repeated the Trump-invented story that Omar, a Somali-born refugee to the U.S., has called her adopted country “a terrible place.”

It’s not even worth the time to explain the details of how Omar said no such thing, or that Trump’s recent attack on Cummings and Baltimore carries any meaning other than his dog-whistle to reactionaries that our African-American neighborhoods are the dangerous “other,” akin to an attack on American values. The people behind this-- Trump and Paul and silent Republicans in Washington -- already know the actual truth, and we know that they know. But all they have left as an electoral strategy for 2020 is to double-down on the worst of their hate-filled rhetoric in an attempt to galvanize a voting energy among the depopulating regiment of the most fearful of the nation’s insecure and under-informed nativists.

Omar wears a scarf on her head and hails from somewhere other than here originally, and all it takes is a little push to reinforce to some voters that those cultural differences amount to an existential threat against established personal liberty. Paul, whose father published a white nationalist newsletter, expresses a particularly profound disingenuousness. He proclaims the importance of personal liberty but provided that it be in the domain of a white person. His libertarian streak smears and fades when it comes to people of color expressing the same critiques of U.S. foreign policy that he routinely offers and clearly takes for granted as his right.

The overt classism and racism in the words of Trump and Paul are the by-products of a worldview without substance. To draw from the words of Dr. Cornel West, it’s an absence of maturity to be able to confront the complicated realities we face, to have the intelligence and understanding to wrestle with the best and worst of our history. By going so far as to flat out invent things that these four Congressional freshmen are to have said, gives away the ghost of the intent. It’s a hit and run of dishonesty. To tell sisters of color, all born here or legally landed as refugees-- and citizens each, to “go back” to their “crime-infested” countries echoes an historic xenophobia that would be recognized personally and acutely by Trump’s paternal grandparents, his mother, and his first and third wives. By shifting from last week’s attacks on the Squad to attacks on the city of Baltimore, several observers have pointed out that he’s basically just moved from what he has called “shithole countries,” to describe places where black and brown people live, to now “shithole districts.”

To offer a public critique of the nation is, itself, as American as an apple double-crust or the ground-rule double, but those in the position of power and privilege fear those critiques when they are out of the mouths of those in the subgroups that have been stepped upon to build the rest of the nation. Ilhan Omar is a woman of courage and a shatterer of taboos. In response to such powerful characteristics, the opposition-- namely Trump, overwhelmed, offers only depraved insults, taunting, and intimidation. His is a false confidence. If the economy was as stellar as Trump claims it is, or if the general quality of American life matched the expectations of even those that voted for Trump with enthusiasm, we wouldn’t be enduring these affronts on general decency instead. Working for the people has been replaced by this. The campaign ideas of 2016 failed and promises not fulfilled. And if the voters you will depend upon aren’t energized, you must dig a new deeper low.

From even before he launched his political career, his bluster read to some of us as insecurity and self-hatred. Those traits are even more evident now. Is this how a “great man” behaves? Is he the man he desperately wants to be? He is not. Trump has always been a “transactional” style of narcissist. If you pledge loyalty to him, he rewards you. If you criticize him, he lashes out at you with fury, and free of constraint or facts. He’s an emotional cripple, a fascinating if not sorrowful psychological case study for future generations on the extremes of inner fragility. And nothing terrifies him more, or brings out his wrath more emphatically, than the type of political opponent who offers up the courage he so sorely lacks.

posted by CM @ 7:28 PM