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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW – October 20, 2009

Alienated & Radicalized
by Pat Buchanan

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,”
“birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath
Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either
strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of
paranoia.”

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who
repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if
it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered
law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights
by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.

“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship
from ever happening here,” says founding father Stewart
Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer.
“My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t
do it without them.

“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a
revolution, we’ll fight with you.”

Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.

And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-
hall protesters, calling them “un-American,” “Nazis” and
“evil-mongers,” one can imagine what they will do with the
Oath Keepers.

As with Jimmy Carter’s long range psychoanalysis of Joe
Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media
will likely be that these are militia types, driven to
irrationality because America has a black president.

Yet, the establishment’s reaction seems more problematic
for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up
to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost
touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of
America divorced from reality.

Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily
understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and
destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction
to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with
the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC build-
ing and bombed the Pentagon.

The “dirty, immoral war in Vietnam” explains why the
“finest generation we have ever produced” is behaving
like this, they said. We must deal with the “root causes”
of social disorder.

Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle
America to distrust its government, for it surely does,
as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:

“Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated.
Big majorities of whites say the past year’s turmoil has
diminished their confidence in government, corporations
and the financial industry… Asked which institution they
trust most to make economic decisions in their interest,
a plurality of whites older than 30 pick ‘none’ — a grim
statement.”

Is all this due to Obama’s race?

Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I
was already black by the time I was elected. And he not
only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or
Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008
that race was an important consideration in voting, said
they were going to vote for Obama.

With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost
surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.

Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white
America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged
as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled
progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.

Referring to the white working-class voters in the
industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said:
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain
their frustrations.”

Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas
in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993, and blocked the Bush-
Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith
purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in
movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered
in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions
to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax
dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no
Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use
and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their
country, are rewarded with free educations and health care,
and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live
on — then carry Mexican flags in American cities and
demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their
next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring,
and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back.
Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative
action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its
books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government
shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks
to rescue the country from a crisis created by the govern-
ment and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing
it  and they are right.