When Joseph Stack crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Building in Texas this past February, he became the first indigenous American suicide bomber. What this destructive act intended to accomplish or did accomplish, other than smash a number of windows and kill a Vietnam veteran who was looking forward to retirement, is not clear. On the surface, what provoked Stack to commit this act was anger, sheer unbridled anger, ostensibly at the government. Why he did this is a question that requires one to look below the surface motivations.

Stack’s behavior, though extreme is not something that has occurred in isolation. His anger is shared by most of the so-called Tea Party members, among many others whose shrill voice resounds in the various media, newspapers and television. Such expressions of vitriolic anger that drives someone to suicide do not emerge from the superficialities of this or that act of government, but from a much deeper level of consciousness. In a very broad sense, the rage on the right is fueled by a traditional rivalry between the city and the countryside. More precisely, it is an expression of conflict between a white, rural and older America and the multicultural, urban newcomers, joined by the intellectual elite. The skirmishes over health care, abortion, climate change, taxes, the environment, unions, jobs and welfare are battles in this larger conflict between these two opposing and mutually hostile sides. I will refer to one side as the ‘American Sunnis’ (for reasons I will elucidate below); its opposite side I will refer to as ‘The Other’, who are multicultural, multiracial, come from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds and are generally less inclined to overt and showy religiosity. The conflict is cultural, racial and religious and it is about fear of loss.

Why do I refer to this group as the Sunnis, a group one normally associates with Muslim countries such as Iraq? That country has witnessed blind rage by one group against the other, resulting in horrendous suicide bombings at weddings, funerals, outdoor markets, and mosques. The conflict is both religious and cultural. Most of the horrific incidents have been initiated by Sunnis Muslims against their fellow Muslims, the Shiites. The reason for this blind and senseless hatred and violence seems to be that the Sunnis, once masters of the country, have lost their power and influence, awakening in 2003 to the disturbing reality that they are a small and relatively powerless minority in their own country, approximately 20% of the population. They feel diminished, even disinherited. This rage, half a world away, resonates with the rage in our country by a frightened minority who feel simultaneously both entitled to dominance and dispossessed. Similarly, the American version also comprises little more than a quarter of the population.

So, who are these American Sunnis? They are the angry voices, mostly rural or suburban and Protestant and Evangelical, whose faces appear in newspaper photos at tea party and other right wing rallies. They are almost exclusively white, most are male, most are of middle age or older. Many are out of work. Their heated but diffuse anger is directed not only against the government and government social programs (such as health care), which they view as catering to the Other, but covertly against unwanted multicultural elements in our society, such as immigrants, gays and blacks. The same hostility is directed against the intellectual ‘elite’, who is mistrusted for its superior airs and its seemingly foreign or subversive agenda. By contrast, Sunnis tend to view themselves as ‘Real Americans’. Their fear of the Other, whom they regard with thinly disguised hatred, drives many of the more emotional Sunnis to paranoia and violence. Their view is bipolar: on one hand they believe themselves to be part of the majority (moral majority), who are ready to rise up and join their protests. On the other hand they see themselves as an oppressed minority.

Their fear is real whether they read the statistics or not. It is based on sober demographic trends, which I will discuss below. Their claim of dominance may have been justified 150 years ago but, if it ever did exist, their America vanished by the 20th century with its huge influx of immigrants, fueled by American’s rise as an industrial, agricultural and scientific giant. That their cherished belief in their own dominance is no longer true profoundly scares the Sunnis.

American Sunnis feel disinherited and diminished by the Other, whom they once dominated. The fear may be real, but it is expressed in a paranoid and possibly dangerous form, as in Iraq. Paul Rasor, writing in the spring issue of the Unitarian Magazine, UU World presents figures showing that blacks and other non-white groups, plus Hispanics, made up 28% of the American population in 1997 and about 34% in 2008. Moreover, demographic predictions indicate that the majority of voting age public will be non white in about 30- 40 years from now. Indeed, non-white births are already thought to have overtaken those of whites, so that it follows that within another 20 years or so, the majority of young people will be Hispanic or non-white. Even today, half of America’s young scientists are foreign born or non white. I find these rather amazing statistics.  

Since January 20, 2009, a new slogan has appeared in American politics as a rallying cry by the right: ‘Take back our country’. Take back the country from whom? Seen in the light of the demographics and their manifestation in the last presidential election, it is a war cry against their own loss, by the demographic onslaught of the Other and by the unforeseen and dramatic emergence of a black president and his multicultural administration. If the loss of power to the Other was a blow to the American Sunnis, the sudden and electrifying victory of the president’s health care bill after a period of almost certain defeat, shocked them further into realizing their growing impotence in an increasingly unfamiliar world. 

Like the Iraqi Sunnis, the sense of loss is provoking a violent mob reaction. Stones, epithets and mud, along with an increasing violent level of threats, have been hurled by members of a mob at black, Hispanic and gay congressmen, presumably for their support of the health bill but more specifically because they represent the menace of the Other. Congressmen have even been harassed at home. The New York Times on March 23, 2010, described this mob of Tea Party sympathizers as ‘insurgents’, evoking an overused word to describe our adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most often groups associated with the Iraqi Sunnis. Our second president, John Adams, feared the mob. In 1782, Joseph Priestly, radical preacher, and eminent scientist (discoverer of oxygen), was driven out of England by a mob which burned down his home and those of several of his sympathizers. In his book, The Invention of Air, Steven Johnson describes how the ‘Church and King movement, a reactionary band of largely working-class men, incited by the conservative elites, hostile to change in all its diverse forms’ were incited to physically attack Priestly and his associates. The working men described by Johnson were poor, but terrified of having their world turned upside down. Priestly and his wife barely escaped with their lives.

Today, reactionary elements, such as the Tea Party movement (a latter day version of the Church and King movement) are encouraging citizens to bring guns to public places, such as coffee houses and even political rallies. Even more sinister, Justine Sharrock, writing in Mother Jones magazine, reported in the April, 2010, issue that a movement is underway to recruit a shadow anti-governmental army of policemen and military personnel, whose patriotic duty is to resist by force of arms their government, specifically the Obama administration and, more subtly, the Other. This movement, whose goal is to foment treason among our military, is shocking. Yet it is being tacitly or overtly encouraged by more visible conservative luminaries and Sunni spokesmen as Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Dick Amery and Ralph Reed, whose ideas are voiced in a smarmy blend of racism, fundamentalist religion and paranoia.

Kevin Phillips in his book American Theocracy claims that the source of the right’s anger today originates with southerners’ resentment against what they view as an invasion by the federal government 150 years ago. Phillips expresses concern that this elemental anger, which began after the end of the Civil War and which he calls ‘southernization’, is beginning to infect white society. (An example of militant southern sentiment is the recent introduction by two southern governors of legislation honoring the Confederacy.)  Many of the most vociferous anti-administration members of Congress are southerners.  Evidently, wounds resulting from the Civil War have not yet healed.

Despite renewed calls by some southerners for succession, the danger of open and widespread rebellion does not seem very great, not only because most whites are simply not buying into the paranoia, but because of the demographic changes I’ve just cited. Even as rural, white southerners seem almost unanimous in their opposition to the government, the Other is making inroads into southern bastions: an Indian computer scientist moves to high tech Atlanta, a Chinese physicist settles in Raleigh, NC, at the Research Triangle Park and a Jewish dentist sets up practice in Falls Church, VA. Black voting in the south surged in the last national election. Even North Carolina voted for Obama by a slight margin.

Thus, the current rancorous diatribe by those on the right against the government is an expression of fear, fear that they have lost control of their government, which is personified by Barak Obama, a black man with a foreign name. The danger is that the strong undercurrent of racism on the right is driving the Other into the Democratic Party, while the Republicans become increasingly marginalized as the party of white men, an organization beginning to resemble the fringe LePen party in France.

I feel sorry for the American Sunnis, They are deeply troubled by the strange world that is starting to surround them and they seem unable to cope with a loss of self respect and power except to brandish weapons in order to puff up their egos and claim to be the true Americans. In all fairness, they are often ridiculed by the left and made to feel inferior, especially by the intellectual elite, the highly educated wing of the Other. Despite the present pernicious political atmosphere, I fervently hope that most of this disheartened segment of American society will ultimately come to embrace the new America and work sincerely to make it better and not take the same path that their Iraqi counterparts have followed.