By David Walsh
The right-wing media set the agenda for the Obama Regime. Their programs don't coincide, but they may as well. The initiative remains with these aggressive reactionaries and is caused by the decline of US capitalism and the collapse of liberalism.
The Shirley Sherrod affair, the case of the black US Department of Agriculture official fired July 20 because of an allegedly racist remark, is profoundly discrediting to every wing of the American establishment.
What happened last week is indisputable: the extreme right media organized a provocation and a spineless White House fell for it hook, line and sinker.
The attempt by sections of the liberal media to turn this now into a new chapter of “the national discourse on race” or an additional “teachable moment”—phrases that should be put out of commission forthwith—is simply a hypocritical diversion.
On July 19, Andrew Breitbart, an ultra-right commentator, posted a deliberately misleading excerpt from a speech Sherrod delivered this past March.
She appeared to be explaining how, 24 years earlier, while working at a non-profit organization, she had not exerted herself on behalf of a white farmer because of her own racial preconceptions.
Sherrod’s father was murdered by a white man in 1965 and his killer was never punished, despite the testimony of witnesses, because of endemic racism in rural Georgia.
Breitbart’s posting, and the threat that other right-wing media outlets, especially Fox News, would take up Sherrod’s remarks, threw the Obama administration into a panic.
An official from the USDA harassed Sherrod as she was driving back to her office with several phone calls, finally insisting that she pull over to the side of the road and send in her resignation on the spot, “because you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
Beck hosts a right-wing program on Fox, where he regales his audience nightly with his unhinged, anti-communist conspiracy theories.
What do these facts demonstrate?
The Obama administration and its hangers-on rushed to judgment on the basis of a two-minute video clip posted by a thoroughly disreputable source.
Breitbart functions in the foul world of ultra-right blogs and web sites. This is a disoriented and deranged petty-bourgeois layer, which identifies any criticism of American free-market capitalism with Bolshevism. They will say and do anything, no matter how unprincipled or violent, to achieve their ends.
Fox News, owned and operated by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is a source of never-ending political provocation. Lying and distortion is a way of life for its stable of slick reactionaries, engaged primarily in whipping up the basest and most backward sentiments. Racism and anti-Semitism simmer just beneath the surface.
Breitbart, his attempted set-up of Shirley Sherrod exposed as a fraud, was entirely unapologetic. These bullying, neo-fascistic elements are not held back by any of the internal constraints that once operated within the American political system and the mainstream media.
They have been set in motion by the immense social and economic crisis, and nurtured within an official environment in the US over the past several decades pervaded by ideological reaction.
This extreme-right element represents the views of a small portion of the American population, yet it dominates at Fox News, major newspapers and has important representatives at virtually every media outlet.
The Obama administration closely monitors the right-wing web sites and cable television programs and reacts more sensitively to their thrusts than to any other single source of political criticism.
The watchword of this administration is that it will not be outflanked on the right. Meanwhile, it is impervious to mounting popular economic distress and opposition to the Wall Street pay bonanza, government inaction over the Gulf oil disaster, and the war in Afghanistan.
In effect, the right-wing media, bankrolled by Murdoch and others, largely sets the agenda for the Obama White House.
Their programs may not formally coincide, but they may as well. The initiative remains, for reasons bound up with the decline of American capitalism and the collapse of liberalism, with these aggressive reactionary types.
In this incident, as in every other one, the pundits reveal their own bewilderment.
Maureen Dowd in the New York Times makes the point that “Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience,” and proceeds to cite the comments of a series of black Democratic Party politicians as privileged and as distant from American social reality as she is.
The Times’ Frank Rich argues, “This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week.
"What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the NAACP and the news media were all soiled by this episode.”
Well, what does it say?
Speaking of Vilsack, Rich comments, “an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck.
That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence.”
Relatively strong words, but Rich draws no conclusions except that “While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.”
Implicitly at least, Rich identifies the fake populist demagogues on the right with popular opinion. What evidence can he muster to make such an assertion?
The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. insists that “The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that ‘fairness’ requires treating extremist rants as ‘one side of the story.’”
But why do they cower?
None of the liberal columnists can answer that question, because it goes to the heart of America’s social reality.
In the end, the human trash on Fox and the right-wing blogs are merely the most naked and brutal face of a crisis-ridden, predatory and essentially criminal American capitalism. The Obama administration and the Democrats serve the same social interests, but in an unconvincingly and half-heartedly liberal guise.
There is a division of labor. Fox News and company proceed to stir up whatever filth they can, while the White House and the pundits assert piously that the country must rise above its alleged preoccupation with race.
But the real story here says something very different. It speaks to the fact that there are two Americas, divided sharply along class lines.
The political and media establishment could so seriously misread the Sherrod case in part because it is insulated by a hundred layers of wealth and privilege from the reality of the working class, the poor, and the sentiments of millions of working people about American life, even if they are not yet fully articulated.
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