Prowed to be A Merkin
When I first moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, the mayor of DC was Marion Barry. He was not a very good mayor–he was too corupt, inept, and apt to be too casual about his illegal drug use–but he was routinely re-elected. He was black and very popular among the black majority in DC. Being a suburban white guy, I never really understood; nor did the people I knew, who were also mostly suburban white guys. Sometime later, the theory developed that supporting Berry was an expression of the you-ain't-gonna-tell-US-what-to-do attitude. Regardless of how often DCs residents pulled the trigger of the gun they kept pointing at their own feet, if anyone pointed it out, well, they'd see who they could push around.
No doubt because of my age, and that I grew up in the 60s, I tend to believe that the current wave of reactionary fervor and American nationalism was rooted there in the civil-rights movement and the feeling of disenfranchisement that it gave to anxious white men. Of course, it did no such thing, since Freedom is not in limited quantities that must be carefully husbanded and doled out sparingly only to the deserving. But they, the White backbone of reactionary America, felt like it did, and it made them angry. Then along came Vietnam, and Nixon, and Women, and Gays, and who knows what other plagues on entitlement of Biblical proportions. They certainly didn't help the old White guys feel any more secure.
Well, no one's going to push them around no more. They never got to nuke Qaddafi's ass (remember how he was certain to destroy the world?), never got to whup the Ruskies, and had to make do with that despot from Panama. Boy, he was a danger, but we showed him!
Well, no more. We went in there and we got that Saddam guy, we got his ass real good, and no World Government is going to tell us what to do. So speaketh the reactionary White guy. And soon America will be a safe haven, ready for Jesus' return.
During the last election, I was willing to believe that the electorate was simply naieve and took all the half truths, untruths, and euphemisms at face value, and thought the boldly outrageous promises to be witty, rhetorical irony.
Apparently not. And this time, there's no excuse really. People know exactly what they were voting for, and they're likely to get it. Is it at all credible that they were just dazzled by the President's new clothes?