What the Birthers Mean for America’s Future

25Jul09

from the DC Writeup

In the past two weeks, the emergence of so-called ‘birthers’ into the mainstream political consciousness has been met largely with astonishment and disdain. The birthers are conspiracy theorists who question the validity of Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate, alleging that the president was born in either Kenya or Indonesia.

But this is no ordinary conspiracy theory, and we need to understand the birthers in order to understand the underside of the new political world created by technology and by the election of our first black president. Catapulted into the limelight by internet organizing and the remnants of the radical right fringe, the birther movement is emblematic of the ways American politics has changed during the past decade.

The fervor of the birthers has been incubated in the strange backwaters of the right-wing blogosphere, an environment not so unlike the ascendant left-wing ‘netroots’ that helped bring Obama to power. Both have their minor celebrities, significant major party connections and cause célèbres. In fact, Robert Gibb’s “15 dollars and a web domain” comment neatly describes what most people call (in other contexts) the democratic potential of internet publishing. Websites like WorldNetDaily have mobilized highly motivated people via a drumbeat of criticism (repeated in the echo-chamber blogosphere), and then allowed these highly motivated people to project what would otherwise be an invisible issue into the limelight — with YouTube and crowding internet polls as their chief weapons.

Which is not to say all net-movements are created equal. The shrill nativism of the birth certificate conspiracists makes them particularly dangerous as the US embarks on a radical reconfiguration of its relations with the world post-Bush. They are the backlash and the defenders of the old guard, and their power must be accounted for as the rest of the country moves forward.

The fervor of the birthers should be understood in its broader context. Essentially, the birthers represent a dethroned white right-wing movement, grasping for some kind of kill switch that will short-circuit the course of change charted by the Obama administration. Many on the right see a host of changes — in the role of government, in the relationship of the US to other countries, and in race relations — and correctly recognize them as a death knell for traditional American conservatism. The birth certificate issue becomes a way to delegitimize everything Obama stands for — and in the case of his legal changes, literally a way to wipe the slate clean.

The same pattern emerges with other prominent conspiracy theories. The 9/11 ‘truthers’ gained steam as the Bush administration went to war in Iraq and a vast network of civil liberty violations came to light. Truthers saw 9/11 as the lynchpin of Bush administration’s power to do most of whatever it pleased, and sought to destabilize the entire administration by revealing the ‘truth’ of what happened on 9/11/01.

Of course, all this could be resolved with the release of one simple document, right?

Not really. Gibbs was right when he said that the birther conspiracy is here to stay, because any facts presented to defend Obama’s American past will be viscerally delegitimized in the eyes of the birthers, who see Obama as a threat to their long held worldview. The birthers’ standard of proof is dictated by a set of values that make any defender of Obama un-American and therefore untrustworthy. The only people worth trusting are fellow reactionaries, who see America’s fall written everywhere — those who don’t must be blind to the truth, and therefore could never read the birth certificate for what it ‘really’ is.

In fact, the birther conspiracy theory evokes the supposedly American values that Obama transcends — notions of rights of birth, rigid identity borders and the ‘Homeland’ that proliferated in the darker days of the Bush administration, and have taken root in some parts of the American psyche. The idea of ‘proof of citizenship’ shows up in a number of right-wing arguments about welfare and voter registration, and in the massive ICE workplace raids that deport anyone funny looking who can’t immediately produce proof of their citizenship. Basically, for the birthers, America belongs to Americans, and if you disagree with what they think the country stands for — well, then you must not be from here.

That’s why I think that mainstream commentators miss the mark when they present official statements and internet print-offs as the final question on this issue. The real battle here is a battle over values — those demanding Obama’s birth certificate espouse the notion that someone becomes great primarily by right of birth, while many of Obama’s supporters backed him because they thought he would be a worthwhile leader in troubled times. The best way to defeat the birthers is to return to talking about the big issues facing our world today. There are more than enough

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