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‘Obama doesn’t love America’: Why US right is still trapped in time warp

Saturday February 28 2015

When Rudi Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he was credited with bringing big crime down by clamping down hard on minor transgressions.

That reputation, whether based on reality or myth, portrayed him as a new-age thinker, a man daring enough to confront complex problems with out-of-the-box ideas, and, importantly, a leader with magnanimity of thought.

That reputation has taken a fatal beating following remarks reported in the press to the effect that, “President Obama does not love America. He was not brought up like you and me to love this country.”

These remarks went outside the democratic tradition of analysing the deficiencies of an opponent’s policies, and offering alternatives to them. Giuliani’s remarks lacked the benefits of an intellectual evaluation, informed as they were by the deep instinctive resentment of the person of President Barack Obama that has since his election as president, formed the central thesis of the American right’s ideology.

The American right wing’s Obama-phobia, is, of course, not usually so visceral. It is often couched in the innocuous language of policy, principle and ideology. Even so phrased, right wing thinking undermines the founding ethos of America and poses a threat to international peace.

For instance, in foreign policy, the right is still trapped in a Cold War time warp. The fact that communism is no longer an existential threat and that even China, Vietnam and Cuba are more interested in commerce than in geopolitical competition, has not yet registered in the right wing mentality.

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They continue to advocate a foreign policy and military stance that views Russia, China, Cuba and, sometimes Vietnam, as existential threats, and precludes the possibility of these nations as partners in solving global crises.

Russia’s Ukraine meddling, though illegal, is a direct result of the arrogant and hostile policies of the West with regard to countries formerly part of the Soviet Union. More fundamentally, the right wing idea of a world order determined and presided over by unilateral American policies and actions is out of sync with a world that is moving steadily towards multilateralism in dealing with global problems.

With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Republicans advocate unequivocal support for Israel, and, following Benjamin Netanyahu’s lead, have continually downgraded the universally supported solution of two states living peacefully side by side.

With respect to Syria, the Republicans seem to have learned nothing from Iraq and Libya. In Syria, they advocate toppling of Assad, a repugnant thug no doubt, but whose removal would see the country erupt into vicious sectarian violence. The better option is to work under the auspices of the UN, bringing interested parties including Russia, China, the EU and the warring factions to a negotiation table.

Domestically, the Republicans still wax romantic about an America of a single puritan ethic that they now consider under threat by a Tower of Babel of languages, religions and cultures.

First, it is doubtful that America ever had a monolithic culture or language, but even if that were the case, the America of today is a multiethnic, multireligious and increasingly bilingual (English and Spanish) society. The idea that Obama, by dint of his personal history and his policies, advances these “un-American” values is deeply ingrained in the right wing psyche.

America became great because of out-of-the-box thinking. America advanced revolutionary ideas about personal freedom, and defined the world and its role in it in non-traditional ways.

Americans embraced the radical idea of an individual and his pursuit of happiness as the defining character of their nation. They rejected colonialism and advanced the idea of self-determination of nations.

That idea of America is now under threat by a narrow-minded politics that hankers after notions of a monolithic culture, and a mythical past of racial and religious homogeneity, and a world order that has been overtaken by history.

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