Our Jacques Derrida’s in the media are at it again.
They are deconstructing the language in the tea party movement to discover secret messages of hate. And they have found the new dog whistle, the claim that the tea partiers want to take the country back.
On MSNBC’s Hardball earlier this month, host Chris Matthews and Washington Post Pulitzer prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson exposed this nefarious turn of phrase for what it is.
MATTHEWS: It seems to me that there`s a cake they`re baking on the right, and very effectively. And all the ingredients are socialist, the delegitimizing of people, the birthers who say he`s not really an American, the attempt to talk takeovers. All these terms seem foreign and…
ROBINSON: “I want my country back.”
MATTHEWS: “My country back.” You know, it seems like they`re baking a cake so that people get this idea he`s [President Obama] not one of us.
The same day Matthews and Robinson gave viewers their deconstruction lesson, New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick was making the link more explicitly on The Charlie Rose Show.
DAVID REMNICK: What`s the phrase — “We want our country back.” What does that really mean, Charlie, really? Is it about tax rates? Is it about health care debates? It seems to me something even —
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think it is?
DAVID REMNICK: Well, I think for some people– for some people, I want to emphasize that — that there is a — that race is attached to it, that ethnicity is attached to it. This is a country is, in the words of James Baldwin, white no longer and will not be white in its majority.
Not to be left out of an argument accusing conservatives of being racists, Democratic strategist Bob Shrum hammered home the same point on MSNBC’s The Ed Shultz Show.
Bob Shrum: I mean, when they say they want their country back, “We want our country back,” I think we now know what they mean. What they mean is that they`re having difficulties with the demographic and societal changes in America, with having an African-American president, with all of the things and all of the changes that they`re seeing around them, not just health care…
As former CIA chief George Tenet might say, slam-dunk, right? The Right has been thoroughly exposed by Matthews, Remnick, Shrum, et al. Except, they haven’t.
While President George W. Bush resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Democrats used the same trope. They wanted to take back America so much, they hosted more than one conference actually labeled “Take Back America.”
It gets better. Guess who spoke at the conference in 2006 and 2007? A certain then-Illinois Senator named Barack Obama.
Indeed, at the Democratic Convention in Denver in 2008, President Obama explicitly urged the delegates to help him “take America back.”
From whom did the President want to take back America?
Well, Republicans obviously. No deconstruction necessary.
In the same way, those on the right who proclaim they “want their country back,” want it back under conservative, fiscally responsible leadership. This, of course, means it must be taken back from the free spending liberals who currently control government.
Except for lunatics on the fringes, that the current head of government happens to be an African American is simply irrelevant.
Jamie Weinstein is a columnist for The North Star National. He can be reached at [email protected] or via his blog, www.JamieWeinstein.com
