BEYOND THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL TICKET
Fourth, I would include right-wing talk radio, FOX NEWS and the rest of the "Republican noise [hate] machine" in the definition of the McCain-Palin campaign. A lot of the ugliest election sentiments and angles are showing up first in places like Sean Hannity's radio and television shows, Rush Limbaugh's radio rants, the O'Reilly Show, and in the pages of hard-right hit-man Jerome Corsi's toxic book "The Obama Nation."
Corsi's "bestselling" volume is a study in neo-McCarthyite smearing and racist innuendo. It demonizes Obama as a "bitter," dangerously "militant" black man - a potential "radical left" threat to white America - for having (as a teenager and college student) consulted such widely read black authors as Malcom X and Franz Fanon. Corsi pushes racist buttons by saying that an Obama presidency would mean the ascendancy of "a Luo tribesman" to the White House and by associating Obama's blackness with Islamic terrorism [4].
PROTO-FASCISM
Fifth, the McCain-Palin campaign and the broader GOP assault structure are about more than racism. Their racism is part of a larger ideological position that I will clumsily call pseudo-populist messianic-militarist white-nationalist neo-McCarthyite hyper-masculinist proto-fascism. Let's just label it proto-fascism for short.
This proto-fascism is evident in the following terrible tendencies and characteristics:
* Regular false conflation of centrist business and imperial liberalism with "extreme leftism." This seen in the repeated absurd charge that the corporate- and military-friendly Obama is some kind of "hard left" "radical." The same "charge" (I use quote marks because I like hard left radicals and happen to be one myself) has also long been leveled at Hillary Clinton and other center-neoliberal Democrats by proto-fascist Republicans).
* A militarized hyper-nationalism that glorifies imperial war and insists on martial victory and unquestioning loyalty to "Country First." According to McCain, the Iraq "war" (really a one-sided imperial occupation perpetrated by the most powerful military state ever on a poor and defenseless nation) must be "won," meaning that all meaningful resistance to the illegal invasion (understandably hated by the great majority of Iraqis for many years) must be crushed once and for all.
* The preposterous inflation of supposed threats to the Virtuous Nation and established order posed by purported left radicals (absurdly conflated with liberals and centrists) in the "God-blessed" "homeland." The Republican machine's obsession with Obama's connection (quite mild) to William Ayers - a youthful ultra-leftist turned middle-aged education professor and charter-school advocate - is an almost laughable case in point.
* Dissemination of the classic fascist narrative claiming that the Noble Nation of Exceptional Greatness has seen its intrinsically righteous military crusades "stabbed in the back" by dastardly, "defeatist," "cowardly," and insufficiently "patriotic" liberals, radicals, and minorities. This was young Hitler's lovely narrative on Glorious Germany's defeat in World War I (see Mein Kampf). It is also the supposed "war hero" [5] McCain's narrative on what went wrong in (the U.S. Empire's vicious assault on) Vietnam (1961-1975) and on what could go wrong in (the same Empire's current vicious assault on) Iraq if Americans let supposed "leftists" like Obama into the White House.
* A dangerous disrespect for civilized norms and international law reflecting a determination to rule the world by sheer force, including torture, colonial occupation, and repeated assaults on nameless foreign civilians. (Proto-fascists call dissent from such practices "anti-Americanism").
* An exaggerated and self-fulfilling sense of the world as "a dangerous place," with evil, typically non-white others waiting behind every corner to senselessly attack inherently good and benevolent America, whose homeland subjects are strongly encouraged to cower under the umbrella of the Big Brother National Security State.
* A toxic anti-intellectualism that proclaims peoples' right to be deeply ignorant and obtuse and identifies as a sneering "elitist" anyone who dares to mention numerous basic troubling facts about U.S. society, history, and policy.
* The preposterous blaming of racial and ethnic minorities for problems created by wealthy elites at the top of the power structure. The early Nazis ridiculously claimed that "dastardly" Jews (along with dishonorable liberals and leftists) were the reasons for "Germany's humiliation" in World War One, when the rulers of that nation came up against the limits of their grandiose imperial ambitions [6]. Jews also received special blame from Nazis for the Great Depression, which actually resulted from the underlying contradictions of interwar capitalism and bad decisions made by predominantly non-Jewish corporate financial elites in places like New York and London.
LOOKING FOR SCAPEGOATS IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
This tendency to viciously scapegoat defenseless minorities is exhibited in Republicans' recent sickening charge that American racial minorities and their supposed liberal and left allies caused the current financial crisis. The accusation is that people like Obama and his alleged "terrorist pal" Ayers worked with purported "radicals" to pass the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (the CRA) to force banks to make irresponsible housing loans to poor, undeserving and irresponsible black and Latino people. The claim has been repeated again and again by right-wing media since late September despite the following facts [7]:
