gracchusdixit

“Take the country back” seems to have become the clarion call of the Republican Party.  Sarah Palin can scarcely scribble a blog without reciting this refrain.  Michele Bachmann just used the phrase in announcing the end of her candidacy.  The tea party has virtually adopted it as a motto.  Conservative talk radio is filled with it.  The Internet boasts a host of URL’s with one version of the language or another.  You can even watch “instructional” videos on You Tube explaining “how to take our country back.”

It’s impossible to say who first voiced this battle cry, and it’s not at all certain that it was a Republican.  Both Howard Dean and Barack Obama said something very much like it in 2008, perhaps to their regret.  What is certain, however, is that the sentiment expressed by this phrase now underpins much of what passes for political thinking on the right.

But exactly what do Republicans mean when they say they want to “take the country back”?  There are at least three answers:  the corporate, the evangelical, and the libertarian.   Among the current front-runners for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney embodies the first answer, Rick Santorum the second, and Ron Paul the third.  But all three answers amount to the same thing, and all three of the men who embody these answers share the same goal:  taking our country backward rather than forward.

Corporate Republicans like Romney want to take the country back to an era when business was free to do whatever it wished, unregulated and unsupervised.  Free to treat employees like chattel.  Free to pollute the environment.  Free to put profit before people.

Evangelical Republicans like Santorum want to take the country back to an era when a narrow and oppressive moralism dominated our public and social life.  When women were second-class citizens.  When gays weren’t treated as citizens at all.  When “uppity” minorities knew their place.  When the values of so-called “Christians” were imposed on everyone else.

Libertarian Republicans like Paul want to take the country back to an era largely of their own imagining when government barely existed, the United States lived in splendid isolation, the “gold standard” dominated our economic life, and ordinary Americans were left to fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world.

Above all else, Republicans want to “take the country back” from Barack Obama, a man who personifies everything they find both mystifying and threatening.  It isn’t the policies of the Obama administration they abhor—which are largely conventional and innocuous—it is the man himself.  A man of mixed race, from a troubled family, who nonetheless succeeded brilliantly in public life.  A man of Christian beliefs who nonetheless both understands and tolerates those with other beliefs.   A man whose very existence contradicts the stereotype of what Republicans imagine an American, let alone an American President, should be.

Republicans don’t question Barack Obama’s birth certificate because it is genuinely in doubt.  They don’t brand him a “socialist” because he is even remotely close to being one.  They don’t call him an “appeaser” because he has given aid and comfort to our enemies.  They do all these things, because the election of Barack Obama sent a clear, unequivocal signal that the America of today is not the America of a century ago.  That is the America the Republicans want to take us back to.