The Right Plays to its Nativist Base

By David Neiwert, TomPaine.com. Posted October 2, 2007.

So Republican candidates were busy finding better things to do this week than appear at a forum where they could debate minority issues. Rudy's excuse was the best: he had to go off and hobnob with Bo Derek.

Digby's right, as usual: It's not just that the no-show reveals the undercurrent of racism that runs through the conservative movement like an ancient underground sewer -- the snub also played an important role in sending a signal to the conservative base.

We've known for some time that the GOP's fake inclusiveness -- hosting black children onstage at campaign events, trotting out big-name minorities in key public positions -- isn't actual minority outreach. It's part of its strategic appeal to fence-sitting white voters as somehow racially sensitive, while continuing to empower and indulge in wink-and-nudge racial politics that sends coded messages to the more naked racists in their base. It also gives them cover even as they pursue policies that reduce civil-rights enforcement on a broad scale.

A big part of playing that game is to keep the signals going to the base. Sometimes it's plain old race- and gay-baiting, couched in ways that let them erect flimsy facades of deniability. At others, it's making subtle snubs like this week's to make sure no one's deluded into thinking that defending white privilege isn't the first and most important job on the right's agenda.

So in the meantime you get a broad range of right-wingers, from Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck to Bill O'Reilly,, and all points in between, finding themselves increasingly comfortable coming out and saying things that no one in their right mind would have found acceptable or reasonable as recent as a decade ago. And the troops are taking note; they're even openly frothing along with their icons at the very thought of an African American running for the presidency.

The big opening for this shift in the dialogue towards near-open acceptance of old-fashioned bigotry is the immigration debate:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the big picture: the anti-immigrant push really represents a significant incursion of right-wing extremism into mainstream conservatism. Each is busy empowering the other, with the end result being an American right pushed even farther to the right.

The nativist right has effectively captured a significant segment of the Republican right, and it's playing out nationally in the immigration debate, most often on the local level. There was, for instance, the immigration forum held in Colorado a couple of weeks ago that was nothing more than an exercise in Latino-bashing:

Tuesday's immigration forum arranged by Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck was orchestrated to play on the worst fears of residents anxious about changes to their community.

… On the one hand, Buck has repeatedly acknowledged publicly that only a small fraction of illegal immigrants commit crimes -- beyond their unauthorized entry into this country. On the other, he attempted to whip up a crowd of 600 that gathered at an auditorium Tuesday night by flashing a slide show of photos of Hispanic men and the crimes they've committed. It was accompanied by an "ominous soundtrack," according to a Rocky Mountain News story.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, right-wingers, nativism

David Neiwert is the author of In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest and Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, A Trial, and Hate Crime in America. He is proprietor of the Orcinus blog.

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