It's the finer details that stick to mind.
I happened to have a minute to lurk on Daily Kos at the office (having come in from the preserve today). Then I proceded to read something that made me gawk:
Who is More Conservative: Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama?
I read the diary. At first, found it somewhat more reasonable than I expected. Then I read on. To paraphrase Deoliver I looked down at my mug, bit my lip, and glanced back up at the screen. Perhaps I missed something. Did Barack Obama cast stories of one race raping another, whether literally or implicitly? Did he continually demonize some disenfranchised Yankee demographic so as to attack them physically?
I happen to have Rick Perlstein's 2008 history masterpiece titled Nixonland with me. Richard Nixon was the transformational president of our time. He refined the culture wars still splitting this country--bereft of much of a political middle, actually--in two like Solomon and the Baby. But it's Ronald Reagan who was the right's darling, always. Because Reagan excelled at racial thuggery.
Within hours of the assasination of social activist Martin Luther King in 1968, Ronald Reagan blamed King--cleverly parsing--for the victim's non-violent, civil disobedience:
"[This was the sort of] great tragedy that began when we bean compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."
Virtually identical words came from Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina: "We are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." This was how the right dog-whistled in the 60s: they especially hated MLK. Reagan was always against an MLK Jr. Day, he only signed a bill for which Congress had veto-proof numbers.
Both men rode racist coat-tails to the halls of power. Reagan's ascendancy accelerated in the 60s during Watts and other riots. (Rioting happened through 1968, providing constant fodder.) As the paranoia of the Cold War started to wane, conservatives turned to the stock characters of the black looter and the radical to frighten the base. These were only slightly removed from the segregationist archetype of the lascivious black male on the prowl for a white female. When Reagan ran for president in the 1980 cycle, he announced his candidacy at town made famous for its lynching of three civil rights workers. Yet another-oh-so-subtle wink.
On April 4, 1968 Reagan also said, "if there is to be a bloodbath, let it be now." Raising the conservative fantasy of a decadent nation being purged by the conservatives with sadistic violence. The day MLK was murdered. As the prosperity of the Johnson administration immolated and sundered, those who wanted to break open hippie skulls or worse found solace in Reagan's narrative, his hate speech. On UC Berkeley in 1964... a campus of:
"sexual orgies... so vile I cannot describe it to you."
After years of demonizing American children at college campuses--especially Berkeley--police found the political will necessary to fire on the DFHs. In early 1969, tensions at Berkeley came to a head over People's Park. The community had taken control of a campus-owned vacant lot blighting the middle of the city. What was so offensive about the alternative? A rock garden, three apple trees, a playground and corn. Governor Reagan's police moved in and counter-action ensued. Rioting, a fire hydrant opened. Bricks thrown. Reagan called in three National Guard battalions. James Rector was shot in the back as he fled the rioting, hovering close to death. So much tear gas was used that inside Cowell Hospital patients and staff "gasp[ed] for breath."
The fifth day of the seventeen-day occupation, Reagan held a press conference... "Once the dogs of war are unleashed, you must expect that things will happen, and people being human will make mistakes on both sides--"
At the Miami GOP Convention in 1968, "We must reject the idea that every time the law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker... it is time to move against these destructive dissidents," many of whom were minors or barely legal. This was the rhetoric that filled to the brim a nation in panic, a nation that would beat and shoot its own children.
I could go on. The "welfare queen" in her Cadillac. The gutting of the state, leaving young women like my mother incapable of raising us kids alone.
To compare our first African-American president to a vile, loathsome demagogue who baited America's racial animus in an era of assassinations, bombings and state massacres clearly seems to be in poor taste. The intent doesn't feel malicious but the result differs. And it's also a lesson that at their worst, even as Mr. Obama escalates Afghanistan, and even as Mr. Clinton too bore some responsibility for our cruel and murderous society, it's inflammatory to compare them so with the racist and sadistic cast of Reagan, Nixon and Bush II.