Anything to win: Pulling off America's ugliest scab

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan told a group of Evangelical Christians Sunday that President Obama's plans threaten "Judeo-Christian values" — a dramatic charge aimed at the Republican base, and delivered during a conference call that did not appear on his public schedule.

In his remarks to what organizers said were tens of thousands of members of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Ryan said that President Barack Obama's path for the next four years is a "dangerous" one.

"[It is] a path that compromises those values — those Judeo-Christian values that made us a great nation in the first place," he said...

Since the early months of 2011, our politics have been marinating in the language of racial hatred, whether in former U.S. senator Rick Santorum’s “ blah people ” moment, or former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s tarring of Barack Obama as “the food stamp president .”

Whether Obama wins or loses, new territory has been broken for the 21st century with the rhetoric of the Republican presidential campaign. Sure, it may seem like we’ve been here before, but the difference is that this time, it’s happening after we thought we had gotten past this level of racial hatred. But if Romney claims victory, having run on such a strategy, a new level of legitimacy will be conferred on the politics of race-baiting...

A poll released last week by the Associated Press reveals an uptick since 2008 in the percentage of Americans who express negative attitudes towards blacks and Latinos. The poll measured both explicit expressions of racial prejudice and implicit attitudes.

On the explicit measure -- prejudiced attitudes people were willing to express outright -- the anti-black prejudice ticked up 3 points, from 47 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012. But when one looks at the implicit attitudes the poll measured, the jump is more pronounced at 7 points. In 2008, the measure of implicit anti-black attitudes was 49 percent; in 2012 that number grew to 56 percent. Meanwhile, write the AP’s Sonya Ross and Jennifer Agiesta, “In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.”

Latinos fared just as poorly in the backlash. Ross and Agiesta explain:

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.

None of this is particularly surprising, given the season of scapegoating immigrants and black people the Republican right has fomented since the election of the nation’s first African-American president. I don’t pretend that these attitudes didn’t exist before 2008, nor do they exist only on the Republican side, as shown in the AP poll . But their expression was far less permissible.

What right-wing leaders saw in the election of President Barack Obama -- a black man with an exotic name, a foreign father and a white mother -- was a touchstone for rallying the resentment of the most fearful sectors of white society, places where people feel threatened by the changing shape of American culture. And so they did what the greediest fat-cats have always done: sought to pit the regular, non-rich people against each other, all in the service of preserving their own power.

It’s what the former slaveholders did in the South during reconstruction. It’s what the Romans did in their conquest of the world. It’s an oppressor’s game that America, having never come to terms with the deeper truths of slavery, is particularly susceptible to.