if we could just focus on clearly explaining why the paranoid opposition to health care reform is based on lies and misinformation planted in the public perception by the interests who stand to lose the most if reform passes, we might get somewhere.

on the other hand, making the perfectly valid point that subtle or unconscious racism plays a significant role in the opposition to anything obama says or does is totally counterproductive. you have to know your audience and know what's going to persuade them, and it should be fairly obvious that the best way to elicit counteraccusations and get the opposition to dig in its heels even deeper is to accuse them of racism.

yes, it's true. the overwhelming majority of people who allow obama's race to color their feelings toward him don't realize it because it's on an unconscious level, and it takes an extraordinary amount of self-actualization to even begin to acknowledge you're doing it. you think people who really believe in "death panels" and think glenn beck and sarah palin are outstanding leaders are capable of being so honest and introspective? please.

that's the difficulty with symbolic (or modern) racism. it derives from deeply-seated beliefs that may even be unconscious. it takes a ton of self-awareness to be able to recognize these feelings. the hallmark of symbolic racism is pretextual discrimination. as in, they don't dislike obama because he's black, they dislike him because he's a fascist socialist muslim.

i was listening to the bbc last night, which provided an interesting perspective. the commenter was saying that health care reform and government spending are typical political issues that are and forever will be debated in every developed country in the world, but the vehemence and vigilance and rage-infused passion with which many on the right oppose obama signals that something else is at work. in other words, merely being opposed to big government and health care reform is not nearly all these people are upset about. if it's not racism, what is it?

From Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 36:

"A critical aspect of the aversive racism framework is the conflict between whites’ denial of personal prejudice and underlying unconscious negative feelings toward and beliefs about blacks. Because of current cultural values, most whites have strong convictions concerning fairness, justice, and racial equality. However, because of a range of normal cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural process that promote intergroup biases, most whites also develop some negative feelings toward or beliefs about blacks, most of which they are unaware of or try to dissociate from their non-prejudiced self-images. These negative feelings that aversive racists have toward blacks do not reflect open hostility or hatred. Instead, aversive racists’ reactions may involve discomfort, uneasiness, disgust, and sometimes fear. That is, they find blacks “aversive,” whle at the same time any suggestion that they might be prejudiced “aversive” as well. Thus, aversive racism may involve more positive reactions to whites than to blacks, reflecting a pro-in-group rather than an anti-out-group orientation, thereby avoiding the stigma of overt bigotry and protecting a nonprejudiced self-image."

In other words, it explains why outlandish theories that would have no chance of sticking to a white president are able to gain traction against a black president.

That line really nails it. Whenever people talk about how Obama has messed up the message with health care, I can't help but think that what's really being said is that he failed to anticipate how inane and absurdly stupid the opposition would be, and should have tailored his message to appeal more directly to the typical easily-manipulated Faux News-consuming idiot.

What powerful institution influences people to "believe" things not only in the absence of evidence, but in the face of direct conflicting scientific evidence? What institution teaches its followers that the more implausible something seems, the more it should be accepted as fact based on nothing more than "faith"? What institution instills in the minds of millions of people that not only is it OK to believe things that are utterly nonsensical and unsupported by any observable evidence, it's the only path to salvation?

We wonder why as a country we're so incapable of intellectually separating good evidence from bad, what's relevant from irrelevant, and correlation from causation; and why we're so susceptible to these kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories. We should look no further than the most outlandish conspiracy theory of them all - that a supreme being created the earth 6,000 years ago, later impregnated a virgin, who then gave birth to the supreme being's son, who later died and was resurrected, and that if you do not believe this with all of your heart, you will spend eternity in flaming misery.

if the protesters were showing up and actually making sense - or even coming close to making a lucid, defensible point - nobody would have any problem. however, one of the cornerstones of a democracy is an informed electorate, and ours (particularly the frothing-at-the-mouth wingnuts who show up to these rallies to "have their voices heard" (read: be disruptive assholes)) is among the least-informed, most ignorant of any developed country. the things being said by these people and the GOP puppeteers who are leading them are so laughably absurd and ludicrously uninformed, that one begins to wondering what they're actually protesting, because they obviously have no idea what they're talking about.

these people are so dumb that they have no idea the level to which they're embarrassing themselves. that's the difficulty - you try to explain why their point is so off-point, and they don't get it. if it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, it's too complicated for them. how do you win an argument with an 8 year old who just says "lalalala ... i'm not listening ... lalalalala"?