America’s political wingnuts create an ugly mood of fear and loathing

AMERICANS — don’t you just love them? Actually, by and large, I do. There’s an ugly snootiness in some quarters in Ireland, and Europe more broadly, towards the US and its citizens which was never quite going to be eradicated by the election of Barack Obama. I have written as much before.

But one recent poll, commissioned to coincide with the publication of a new book by erstwhile New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s former speechwriter, called into question even my pro-Americanism.

On the heels of healthcare, the Harris poll appeared to reveal that 40% of Americans think Obama’s a socialist and 32% think he’s a Muslim. A smaller proportion, 13%, think “he wants the terrorists to win” while 14% believe “he may be the Antichrist”. Step back a moment and ponder that. Something like 35 million adult Americans think not that his policies are misguided but that he is a supernatural personification of evil who will do battle with Christ in the last days.

Who are these loonies? Well, registered supporters of the Republican party in the main, it seems. According to Harris, fully two-thirds of Republicans think he’s a socialist and well over half, a Muslim.

Another 42% believe he is somehow “racist,” 38% think he is doing many of the same things as Hitler and 61% of Republicans imagine he wants to abolish gun ownership. Half think he wants to turn over the US to a single world government.

Many newspapers published the results uncritically. It looks as though one-time Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson was right: “In America any boy may become president and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes.”

And make no mistake, there are some crazy people in America (as there are in Ireland as we saw in Holywood, Co Down on Monday).

Numbskull members of a small Christian militia group were arrested last week on charges that they plotted to murder a local law enforcement officer and then bomb his funeral procession in an attempt to spur a civil war in the US. Nuts, eh?

There does indeed seem to be an unwelcome return to the heated atmosphere of the mid-1990s when militia movements proliferated in the wake of Bill Clinton’s election and incidents occurred such as the bloody siege of members of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. Worst of all, Timothy McVeigh planted a bomb in Oklahoma, killing more than 160 innocent men, women and children.

But back to that poll. What was very poorly reported was the questionable methodology. The survey was done among people who sign up to click through questionnaires via the internet in exchange for cash and gifts — not a probability sample.

It started by telling respondents: “Here are some things people have said about President Obama,” then asking if they thought each was true or false. “Some people have said” is a biasing introductory phrase; it imbues the subsequent statements with an air of credibility and participants were given no alternative proposition to consider.

Moreover, rather than answering disparaging poll questions literally, people who are ill-disposed towards Obama may simply use these questions as an opportunity to express their general antipathy.

Harris, and a gullible media, then reported these results as what right-wing Americans “believe” and as opinions they “hold”, as if they themselves came up with these notions rather than having them one-sidedly set before them on a plate.

In fact, of the 15 statements listed, only two — “He is a Muslim” and “He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president” — are straightforward (and false) factual assertions.

The other 13 were matters of opinion or speculation about his motives which almost anyone would agree cast Obama in a harshly unfavourable light. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the survey was designed to make Republicans look unhinged.

Thankfully, the book the poll was designed to promote — Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America — is a bit more nuanced. John Avlon warns of the dangers of hyper-partisanship, when Americans start believing it is patriotic to hate their president and argues the wackos must be confronted by the mainstream Republican leadership before their wild ideas gain any further currency: “Hate is a cheap and easy recruiting tool, but the problem with hate is that it ultimately leads to violence.” This extreme uproar against America’s first black president isn’t driven by explicit racism, Avlon contends, but by fear of what Obama represents: the growing multicultural majority rising in the United States. By around 2040, American whites will be outnumbered by Hispanics, Asians, blacks and other minorities.

He documents numerous instances of right-wing US commentators comparing Obama to fascist and communist dictators. Fox News pundit Ann Coulter described Obama’s memoirs as “a dime store Mein Kampf”, for instance. Shock-jock radio host Rush Limbaugh has talked about Obama imposing “Nazi-like socialism policies” before qualifying it by adding “we’re not talking about the genocide — that’s at the tail end of Hitler,” as if the murder of six million Jews, gypsies and gays were a mere detail. This nonsense is gaining at least some penetration. Avlon recalls a meeting where an Israeli-American was defending Israel’s national healthcare system to reporters when a woman shouted, “Heil Hitler!” She later explained, “I’m a conservative and I just believe in biblical values.” On which subject, one Republican congresswoman asked God to kill the healthcare bill, calling it a “battle that will be won on our knees in prayer and fasting”.

THE American mood is indeed ugly right now. The pitched battle over healthcare may be over, but the debate over who was victimised most for their position rages on. First, Democrats made fundraising appeals highlighting death threats and vandalism against Democratic lawmakers.

Frustrated, Republicans adopted similar same tactics. Avlon seems to be correct: the competition for victim status exemplifies how divided the US has become. But as Avlon also points out, “neither side has a monopoly on virtue or vice. There are unstable individuals at both ends of the political spectrum”.

Furthermore, as he examines in detail, independents — economic conservatives but social progressives who are not aligned to either main US party — are now the largest and fastest growing segment of the American electorate. They’re all ages, sexes, races and ethnicities, though younger Americans are crowding the front rows.

So, just as it’s simplistic to claim “conservatism in America now runs in a continuous line from Mike Vanderboegh (a militia leader responsible for violent attacks on Democratic party offices) to Sarah Palin”, as one Irish Times correspondent did recently, it’s equally wrong to imagine America is divided into hard left and hard right. There’s a whole lot of ordinary decent Americans between the two political poles — just as there are lots of ordinary decent Americans between the east and west coasts who also get ignored sometimes. Take the stereotypes too far though and you’re in danger of becoming a bit of a wingnut yourself.

Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America by John Avlon is published by Beast Books, £8.99