Andrew Bolt, who doesn't spend much time critiquing Trump (because that's what culture warriors do - spend all their time on How Bad is the Enemy, Hey?)
does a short post on Obama's criticism of Trump, and gets 300 comments, nearly all, of course, agreeing that Obama was just
the worst.
Ben Shapiro the other day tweeted that it was all Obama's fault - for "lecturing us" - that the US ended up with Trump.
As Ezra Klein wrote:
You see this on the right a lot, and I’ve come to think
it the most revealing argument in conservative politics right now. It
shows how desperate conservatives are to absolve their movement of
responsibility for Trump, but it’s also, in an important sense, true —
it’s just a truth the right (and sometimes the left) refuses to follow
to its obvious conclusions.
Let’s state the obvious, and state it neutrally: A
critical mass of Republican voters responded to the eight years of
Obama’s presidency by turning to Trump. The question is why.
Obama’s answer blames demographic and technological
shifts that scrambled our economic, social, religious, and civic
institutions. Shapiro’s blames an emotional reaction to the first black
president.
It's extremely hard to understand why conservatives reacted so strongly against the moderate and reasoned approach to rhetoric that Obama deployed. (And I say that while fully acknowledging that the "now the oceans will start to drop" was a very unwise bit of hyperbole - but not one that indicated that there was something wrong in his head, like Trump looking at photos of his inauguration and insisting that they told a story that everyone else's eye could see wasn't true.)
But Klein goes on to note that it's not as if conservatives were ever listening directly to Obama anyway:
For all Shapiro’s focus on Obama’s “lecturing,” the
reality is that the right experienced Obama less through listening to
his full speeches and more through hearing his presidency refracted
through Fox News and conservative talk radio. And in those spaces,
Obama’s presidency was framed in the most threatening possible terms. In
2009, Rush Limbaugh, whom Shapiro has honored as “one of the founders
of the modern conservative movement,” told his millions of listeners:
How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama
administration? By hating white people, or even saying you do, or that
they’re not good, or whatever. Make white people the new oppressed
minority, and they are going along with it, because they’re shutting up.
They’re moving to the back of the bus. They’re saying I can’t use that
drinking fountain, okay. I can’t use that restroom, okay. That’s the
modern day Republican Party, the equivalent of the Old South, the new
oppressed minority.
On its face, this is laughable. But Limbaugh’s audience wasn’t laughing. They were listening.
True.
While Klein doesn't use the word "racism", he does refer to "white fragility":
The term “white fragility” is overused in politics right now, but it is
relevant here: The unwillingness to state the obvious — a critical
proportion of Republican primary voters enthusiastically supported the
candidate who promised to turn back the demographic clock — might be
politically wise, but it’s analytically disastrous. Black voters who
supported Louis Farrakhan would never be treated with such delicacy.
Personally, from years of reading Catallaxy comments, I think it's hard to deny that an undercurrent of simple racism helps explain the unreasonableness of extreme reaction to Obama too: this
black president thought he was better than us. For Australians, a useful comparison may be made with Kevin Rudd - sure, he was disliked for being a "I know better than you", plum voiced lecturer; but the intensity of hatred for him I think was still significantly less than that which his Australian haters still hold towards Obama (and even his wife.) And I find it hard to believe that the comparative race backgrounds doesn't have something to do with that.
