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Washington protests update
Viewpoint
Wednesday September 23rd 2009
In his Washington Diary, Daniel Nasaw recalls the protests against Barack Obama's effort to provide healthcare for all Americans and analyses the potent symbolism of the Gadsden flag, waved by thousands of protesters
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Wednesday September 23rd 2009
Protesters voice their displeasure with Barack Obama in Washington. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
At his January inauguration and again this month, President Barack Obama drew massive, energetic crowds to America’s National Mall. But in their politics, mood and even skin colour the two groups could not have been more different.
Hundreds of thousands of angry conservatives flocked to Washington on 12 September to oppose Obama’s effort to provide healthcare for all Americans, his pouring of public money into the US economy to save it from collapse, and just about everything else the new president has done or promised to do.
The frothing-mad protesters carried signs denouncing the nation’s first African-American president as a Nazi, a socialist, a lump of human waste, the Joker from Batman, and, perhaps most disturbingly, an African witch doctor.
But thousands also carried the flag that is fast becoming a symbol of backlash against the president: a bellicose yellow banner depicting a rattlesnake poised to strike and bearing the slogan, “Don’t tread on me.”
Known as the Gadsden flag for its purported creator, Colonel Christopher Gadsden, it was a revolutionary war-era naval standard that was carried into battle during the civil war and flown during both world wars.
For years, it was an edgy way to express one’s patriotism. But recently the Gadsden flag was adopted by a certain conspiracy-minded, paranoid faction of the American populist right – libertarian types who in interviews question whether the 11 September attacks were an inside job, call for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, and who stockpile gold in preparation for the coming global economic meltdown.
Its slogan seems a fresh expression to a new sentiment Obama evoked in the protesters – intransigent opposition at all costs to his policy agenda and his vision for America.
The fury at the protests was palpable – a resentful amalgam of cultural, political and racial animosity levelled at a president who won a greater share of the popular vote than any president since George Bush Sr in 1988.
The reaction is deeper than it is broad. Obama’s job approval has indeed declined since he took office amid a continuing weak economy and the Democrats’ halting efforts at healthcare reform. It is unlikely many of the protesters voted for Obama
in the first place. According to a poll of polls by website realclearpolitics.com, 53% of Americans approve of Obama’s job, compared to 11% who disapprove.
Among the crowd specific complaints were few, giving the event the feel of a protest against a man and against history rather than any policies. The level of vitriol aimed at the president seemed out of whack with the substance of the grievances. What is it about Obama’s healthcare proposal that makes steam boil out of people’s ears?
Demonstrators who were absent when President George Bush turned a Clinton-era budget surplus into a yawning deficit by extending tax cuts to the rich and launching two costly wars railed against what they described as Obama’s runaway government spending.
“I think his agenda is to actually destroy this country,” a middle-aged woman waving a small American flag said at the demonstration.
Although the participants in the protest were almost all white, the reality is more complicated than classic American Jim Crow racism. For one, generational and cultural differences may account for much of the distaste. “It is a sense that someone who is not like them in an array of ways is in power and those protesters are going to be people who see power in a zero-sum way,” said Jay Barth, a political scientist at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.
In addition, many Americans who would not describe themselves as racists and who claim black acquaintances and listen to black music nevertheless hold deep-seated racial antipathy they are unlikely to express or acknowledge, even to themselves. With its signs and slogans ostensibly aimed at the president’s policies, the anti-Obama movement has given these people what seems like a legitimate way to express their discomfort at seeing a black man from Chicago’s South Side in the White House.
Flown by this lot, the Gadsden flag has suffered the fate of the English St George’s Cross. But in recent years, the St George’s Cross has enjoyed a measure of rehabilitation. The Guardian’s Sarfraz Manzoor wrote that he “stopped fearing and started loving the flag” during 2002. “This was the summer of the Jubilee and the World Cup, and the country was seemingly drowning in St George flags,” he wrote in 2004.
Perhaps the Gadsden flag will similarly re-emerge as a symbol for all Americans, not just reactionary Obama-haters. Next year in South Africa, anyone?
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