Anger toward Obama, government not just about health care

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — At the dawn of the Barack Obama era, the promise of hope has faded. America’s public square is an angry and bitter place.

Finger-pointing and yelling at town-hall meetings this summer are signs of a country that’s been building toward a boiling point for several years, stressed by a fast-changing economy, a flood of immigration and threats at home by terrorists.

It’s a land at turns frustrated and irate at a government that led them into an unpopular war, proved itself inept at helping its citizens in a disastrous hurricane, presided over a historic economic collapse, then went on a spending spree that could commit their country to decades of crushing debt.

Untold numbers of Americans seethe with anger at President Obama and his fellow Democrats, resentment coupled with fear even more intense than the rage other Americans expressed just a year ago at George W. Bush and the Republicans. One telling sign: The comparisons of the president to Hitler remain the same — only the face has changed from Bush to Obama.

“It’s ugly,” said independent pollster John Zogby. “Ugly and sad because there were many of us who felt the ugliness could be transcended this time.”

Americans throughout their history have been prone to periods of anger and suspicion against one another, particularly in times of change and stress. The anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the rise of the Klan in the 1870s, the Palmer Raids against leftist radicals and immigrants in the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s.

This anger is more focused on the federal government, a resurgence of the hostility toward the government that started with Vietnam in the 1960s and Watergate in the 1970s, faded in the 1980s, resurfaced in the early 1990s and then faded away again.

“There seems to be a reservoir of anger in the country of a particularly intense and shrill variety that it is not simply what’s appeared at the town meetings,” said Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University and an expert on extremist groups.

“In a sense, they were the most visible sign of something that may be larger.”

Some of the rising anger predates Obama — built on the natural American DNA of skepticism toward the government, exacerbated by moves to give the government more power in both the Bush and Obama administrations, and magnified and spread by a new era of communications.

Threats and inappropriate messages to federal judges and court personnel doubled from 2002 to 2008, forcing the U.S. Marshals Service to open a new Threat Management Center to handle the workload.

The number of people refusing to pay taxes to a government they claim is illegitimate rose so much in recent years that the Internal Revenue Service last year created a National Tax Defier Initiative to fight them.

Immigration from Latin America has fed resentment, as well as a fear among some groups that the country’s very sovereignty was at risk.

Some warn of secret plans for a North American Union that would meld the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. Others say that Mexicans have a secret “Plan de Aztlan” that would reconquer the southwestern U.S.

The ranks of self-styled militia groups is on the rise, with 50 new groups cropping up, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group that tracks hate groups.

“They’re just bristling with anger,” said Larry Keller, who wrote a recent analysis of militia for the center. “It’s the most growth we’ve seen in 10-12 years. It’s not what it was in the early ’90s, but it’s trending that way.”