O'Reilly's Traditional America: Losing Its Stuff?

It couldn't have been just me who heard the racism implicit in Bill O'Reilly's lament for America that supposedly passed for an analysis of the significance of Barack O'bama (sorry, couldn't help adding the apostrophe) being reelected despite all the confidence that Karl Rove espoused for weeks prior to the election.   (Note: the link above is merely to a Google search. Find the clip yourself.  Not going to give Fox the plug here.)

We know that the Stewart/Colbert fake news machinery got it, and you can find a few other locales where people are analyzing O'Reilly's remarks.  (I liked this one myself.)  While O'Reilly was one of the few who spoke publicly what was on a lot of the rightwing pundits' minds anyway,  he also represents one major aspect of the "analysis" rhetoric: the absolute refusal to look inward to understand how come your guy lost.   As I noted in a post from yesterday, the network's interests do not necessarily overlap the party's, and the talking heads are quite content to spew out distortions of reality that they know their audience wants, and for that audience, it's easier to believe that the liberal media lie to them, that people who support universal healthcare are commies, that the President is a Kenyan Muslim, etc. 

But what O'Reilly's remarks also reveal is another layer of the deeply felt white resentment at a perceived loss of power.   His comment on the slight majority -- enough to win a  Presidential election despite lots of GOP voter-suppression efforts -- as the side that just "wants stuff" was of course laughable, as Stewart pointed out, since the Fox audience also gets stuff too (like Medicare and for the very top of the food chain, obscene tax breaks).   O'Reilly doesn't specify much about what the traditional America was, but obviously, it is overwhelmingly white (recall how hard it was to see any people of color at the GOP convention), and it is also the hard-working "half" of the country.  It's not much different than Romney's 47 percent remarks, really.  Yep, that's right: we voted for Obama so that we can sit our our lazy black and brown asses and still get paid.  

There is something more insidious about "Traditional America."  It implies that before "we" did such "wrong" things like enfranchise blacks and women, offer degrees of amnesty to illegals, and stop stigmatizing homosexuality, America was this serene place where all good people can work hard and hope to reach a dream, even if it meant working 100 hours a week at a steel mill or coal mine.   "We went downhill when we began handing out money to the 25 percent of the population that went out of work when the Depression hit, further still when Lyndon Johnson tried to secure the rights of blacks promised by Emancipation AND create more welfare programs.  

It's a distorted reading of history, to say the least.  (This is not surprising, since O'Reilly is the guy who once tried to claim that the Klan started in the north and then said that its founder was a former Confederate general.)    The America O'Reilly imagines is one before Brown v Board of Ed, before Roe v Wade, before Stonewall, before the full recognition that people who are not white actually live in this country.  (It's worth noting that over a century ago, the Irish were not considered truly white Americans.  So much for traditional America, Mr. O'Reilly.)

We have to be wary about rhetorical evocations of a "traditional" past that more often than not never really existed.   I think sometimes about those who opposes changes in the rules of baseball, who are often called "purists."  I worry about that notion, because to be a purist 65 years ago could have meant opposing integration of the sport.  Just because it's the way it's "always been" doesn't make it right -- and that's especially the case when the way it's always been isn't really true to begin with.  

The stuff those who voted for Obama want is summed up nicely by xojane: 

 being able to marry who they want, and full autonomy over their own internal organs, and a well-funded educational system, and access to affordable health care, and taxes that don't fleece the middle class to benefit the rich, and a fair shot at success in this world. 


Oh, that's right, that stuff.   Somehow, O'Reilly, who tries to present himself as a working-class-hero, misses that point:  he thinks that if the Obama voters get more stuff, he has to give up more stuff.  Traditional America has lost something: its grip on reality, though "Traditional America" has little basis in reality, too.