We look back on the race-baiting of a George Wallace or the Red-baiting of a Joe McCarthy with a mix of pity and disgust.   In retrospect, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy creates a feeling of dismay.  In 1970, the now-repentant Kevin Phillips described the logic of the Southern strategy this way in a New York Times interview:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

At least the guy was straightforward.

But how do we react when we see our contemporaries pandering to fear, ignorance and the basest of human instincts? 

A rough-and-ready consensus is forming around the idea that Florida pastor Terry Jones went a step too far when he urged his tiny flock to burn copies of the Koran.  Even the likes of Sarah Palin and Franklin Graham admit the man with the exotic whiskers stepped a wee bit over the line.  But who do you think put the crazy notion in the pastor’s head?  The likes of Sarah Palin and Franklin Graham. 

Of course, not everybody disagreed with Pastor Jones.  Consider this rant from the editor of the Mississippi chapter of  the Council of Conservative Citizens (State Senator Lydia Chassaniol’s favorite organization):

I say screw the Muslims and there (sic)  world.  There are roughly 14 major conflicts in the world and out of those, 13 are Mulsim (sic) attempts at overthrowing existing governments.  I heard a guy on Sid Slater the other day and I agree with him. We should fill the desert in Afghanistan up with Qurans, light them on fire and when the muslims come running out we just shoot them all. All mulsims (sic) may not be bad, but enough of them are that if you killed them all we would eliminate 95% of the worlds conflicts over night.

And then there is this latest bit of insanity from the Texas State Board of Education.

The violent crime rate is now only half what it was twenty years ago, so, mercifully, we are no longer bombarded with tough-on-crime rhetoric.  But the fear-mongers had to find a new and better scapegoat.  First it was Mexican immigrants.  More recently, anti-Muslim hate-speech has pushed the immigration issue off the front page. 

In a surreal twist, Republican guru Newt Gingrich is seriously (I guess) suggesting that Barack Obama inherited his father’s Kenyan anti-imperialism and is thus the wrong man to be guiding the fortunes of the American Imperium.  Times Columnist Maureen Dowd places these comments in ironic cultural perspective: “Gingrich, who ditched two wives (the first when she was battling cancer; the second after an affair with the third — a House staffer — while he was impeaching Bill Clinton), now professes to be a good Catholic. Evidently the first two wives don’t count because he hadn’t converted to Catholicism.”

Is Newt kidding?  Does he really expect us to believe that Barack Obama inhabits the mental world of a Kenyan tribesman circa 1950?

Probably not.  According to an intriguing piece of analysis in today’s Times, Matt Bai argues that the newest iteration of hate-politics is an attempt to unite a splintered conservative movement around a common enemy.  “Mr. Obama’s alleged sympathy for so-called Muslim extremists who would desecrate the World Trade Center site, his socialist African ancestry and his early years in Indonesia — all of this creates a shadowy archetype that every conservative enclave, fiscal, foreign policy and religious, can find a reason to fear.”

Tragically, Americans fall for this sad political strategy over and over.  We aren’t all swept up in the twisted group-think, of course, but the cheesy rhetoric always works on just enough people to swing an election.  The Tea Party faithful may look like laughable clowns from the faculty lounge at Harvard or the editorial room at the Washington Post, but this is the only political faction in the nation right now with honest-to-goodness momentum. 

Friends of Justice is building a “common peace” consensus.  We want to end mass incarceration and that can’t happen in a political atmosphere dominated by equal measures of fear and hate.  It’s all-too-easy to poke holes in the arguments of the far right, but little is accomplished if the only folks listening are the usual suspects on the Left. 

Instead of bashing our opponents with equal-and-opposite gusto, we need to start talking love, understanding, justice, unity, forgiveness, grace and peace.  These words seem so weak, so un-newsworthy, so out-of-place in the slowly collapsing empire we call America.

So we must create a different America.  That is the great thing about our country, it can be whatever we will it to be, so long as we work like dogs to make it so.  We need the enthusiasm and passion of the Tea Party movement minus the fear and vitriol. 

Brian McLaren recently shared a terrific quote from Baptist ethicist David Gushee.  “The Christianity of ‘International Burn a Koran Day’ exists,” Gushee admits.  “It is a sorry version of Christianity, but it exists. It must be defeated by better versions of Christianity.” 

Someday, historians will look back on 2010 and analyze the wave of xenophobic hysteria raging through the heartland.  By then, it will be too late.  Those of us with the courage to love, embrace, care, trust, hope and aspire must start building a common peace consensus while the wheel still spins.