The Politics of Revenge

The inauguration of Barack Obama was celebrated as a coming together of the American people. We now know that was at best a misreading. The people who voted against Obama resent the fact that he won. Obama’s job now is to convince them that he can share their values and respond to their needs.

Prior to the election, 80 percent of the people felt the country was going in the wrong direction. Virtually everyone wanted change. As you would expect -- but no one seemed to note at the time -- half of the people wanted to go back to the conservative future that George Bush had promised but not delivered on. The other, progressive, half wanted to get past George Bush to a more liberal future.

A wide swath of conservatives, Republicans, reactionaries and libertarians who voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin are angry about the outcome of the election and they want to do something about it

The moderate conservatives, mostly old-line Republicans just want less government and to be left alone. These people are willing to use the electoral process to achieve their ends.

The less moderate, who are really angry, have disrupted town hall meetings, attended tea parties, and marched on Washington. These people have a deep sense of unease and fear for our country. These fears arise from both the economic and political crises and the results of the election.

The least moderate are, in fact, radical know-nothings. They include the birthers, the death panelists and those who accuse Obama of being a communist and a Nazi, of setting up concentration camps and proposing to pull the plug on grandma. These crackpots are literally taking up arms, emptying the stores of guns and ammunition and even carrying sidearms and assault weapons to public meetings.

Republican politicians do not serve their constituents well when they cave in to these radicals, let Rush Limbaugh control the Republican platform and simply dismiss the Obama agenda.

These politicians use the call for small government as an excuse to oppose any and all legislation, despite the immediacy of our Great Recession. Insofar as they have an action platform, it is a hawkish nationalism: fighting illegal immigration, maintaining national security, and passing their social agenda against gays and choice.

All of these people are angry. They have a deep resentment of the fact Obama is everything a down-home conservative has been taught to hate and fear. He is a big-city Democrat, had a foreign born father who actually went back to his home country, is a Harvard Law School graduate, and, most of all, is an organizer of the poor and a union supporter. And now this guy is President! It's like we elected Saul Alinsky. They know that can't be right!

So they see Obama as a socialist or a Nazi, a communist or a liberal, but mostly as a foreigner who has usurped the Presidency of these United States of America. He is a direct threat to their nativist, isolationist, belligerent America. They would hate him even if he weren’t black.

The French have a name for this combination of hatred and hawkish nationalism. They call it "revanchism," the politics of revenge.

Revanchism describes a world where conservatives cling irrationally to old values and institutions in an age of progressivism. They look backwards, misread history and slip into resentment and what amounts to a desire for revenge.

The South misread the lessons of the Civil War. They rejected the fact that strength grows out of union and freedom. They adopted a loser’s resentment that still simmers beneath the cover of Nixon’s Southern Strategy and now poisons the Republican Party. The impeachment of President Clinton was pure retribution for forcing the Nixon resignation.

When Republican politicians impeached Clinton and when they demonize Obama they dig themselves and their Party deeper and deeper into a revanchist trench. It is all driven by a sense of grievance or victimhood. That way leads to marginalization for both them and the ideas that they were elected to represent.

President Obama is, as I have written before (LDNews Jan 22, 2009), basically still a community organizer who is more interested in community and conciliation than being the decider. To Obama the process drives the content, not vice versa. He is not an ideologue or an idealist. There is room for dissent in his presidency and it can come from the right or the left.

The real task for Obama is to somehow convince all those rational conservatives out there that they can still have influence in the new world that is coming, that they can help rebuild this great nation. But they can't do that from a position of hatred and resentment.