Nov. 6 just may go down as the worst day in American history—at least for a certain segment of American white male.
The reelection of Barack Obama on Tuesday appears to have caught a large swath of white males by surprise, perhaps because they had been listening to a steady stream of completely fabricated pronouncements from the right-wing echo chamber about the inaccuracy of the polls, about the certainty of a resounding Romney victory. So their shock at Obama’s relatively easy win seems to be exacerbating the racist-fueled anger that many of them already were exhibiting in the months leading up to the election.
Led by common sense-challenged forces like Donald Trump, white male anger is exploding on websites all across the web, with nasty name calling, cries for the South to secede, mass emigration to Europe (of all places) or even the breakup of the United States.
“Welcome to a truly white minority world,” wrote a commenter on Stormfront, the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum, run by a former Alabama Klan leader. “The future is now. There is no denying this. The sun has set on humanity’s greatest era: 1500-2000. … [T]he only way to survive this war of Annihilation is separatism. … [W]e have to choose regions or states.”
Mark Potok, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacist groups, wrote that the radical right had already been driven to an apoplectic state by the news that there were more non-white babies born in the United States last year than white babies.
“In recent years the number of hate groups has risen to more than 1,000, and the number of anti-government ‘patriot’ groups has shot up from just 149 in 2008 to 1,274,” Potok wrote on the Huffington Post. “For months now, groups on the radical right have increasingly fretted about a possible Obama victory. Now that that has occurred, the radical right may grow more dangerous still.”
On sites like redstate.com, conservatives are desperately looking for some salve for their open, bleeding, Obama-induced wounds. This is the kind of medicine that they are lapping up:
“President Obama was overjoyed to hand out the little blue happy pills,” a writer named Repair Man Jack wrote in his dissection of Obama’s appeal. “Food Stamp enrollment shot up. Welfare benefits were extended, requirements for welfare reform got waived and disability applications grew faster than job creation. Such is the pharmacological brilliance of the Obama Economy. I’m not seeing any cures out there, but he’s sure got a new pill for whatever puts a gimp in your walk and makes it clear you can only get that little, magical pill from him.”
What’s clear is that conservative leaders on Fox News and other places, men like consultants Dick Morris and Karl Rove, were so convinced that their huge flood of Super PAC money could overcome even the cold hard facts of the electoral map, which always indicated that Romney had an almost impossible task in overcoming Obama’s many advantages. By lying to their troops and feeding them conspiracy theories about rigged polls and dysfunctional voting locations, these men served not only to increase the pain that their loyal followers are now feeling but also their determination to no longer work within the framework of the American democratic system to bring about the change they desire.
The system that the rest of the country has had to suffer with for centuries, a system that clearly worked to benefit mostly white men, has now been used for the benefit of people of color, of women, of gays—and the white male contingent is still unwilling to accept it. So their response is that the system is either broken—or it should no longer be used.
Perhaps there has been no more powerful testament to the beauty of the American democratic experiment than the fact that it is now being used to bury white men in an avalanche of enthusiastic black and brown voters—who have been motivated by the attempts of Republicans this year to take voting rights away from the poor and disenfranchised, and by the efforts to demonize Latinos under the guise of immigration reform.
This American system, created by the Founding Fathers, the original angry white males, is now being used against them.
That, too, is America.
