This is Who They Really Are: NPR Asks Romney's Supporters About His Barack "The Welfare King" Obama Lies

"I really don't want to help somebody who just decides, 'Oh, well, I was raised on welfare. I can raise my children on welfare,' " Malcolm said. "I had a cousin who, she is a registered nurse and the stories she told me about people coming in there and having babies just so they could get more on their food stamps and more on their welfare. It's like no, I don't want to take care of those people."

I am still handing around the begging bowl in order to try to make my way to Chicon7. Two intrepid souls out of the many more visitors to WARN this week have kindly put thrown in some change. Talk about my public embarrassment and shame.

If you like WARN give their monies some company if you can--a dollar or five from a few folks can go a long way. Such gestures are appreciated, as it would make me smile, and ghetto nerds everywhere would be in your debt. Plus, if we make our goal, you get to hear some of my lurid and embarrassing stories, as well as read part of my equally laughable novella.

My obligatory and awkward NPR inspired fundraising moment ends now.
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Wednesday's edition of All Things Considered on NPR featured a particularly revealing segment on Mitt Romney's lies about President Obama and welfare reform that many of you will likely find of interest.

NPR interviewed attendees at a rally for Mitt Romney, the Tea Party GOP's presumptive presidential nominee, near Pittsburgh. There, they asked Romney's supporters about the candidate's repeated, willful, and transparently naked lie, that President Obama is going to rollback welfare reform and encourage the "parasitic" and "slothful" behavior of the undeserving (read: black and brown women) poor.

It is apparent that the folks who were interviewed are deeply immersed in a Right-wing propaganda fueled alternate reality universe. Perhaps most troubling, is how when confronted with the basic fact that Mitt Romney, their chosen candidate, is lying about Barack Obama, these individuals have a moment of cognitive dissonance, and then quickly return to partisan script.

The white conservative populist base has decided that Obama is the devil; these same people will then reframe how they process the facts in order to reach this conclusion. This type of post hoc reasoning is disturbing because it can be manipulated to justify all types of anti-social behavior, behavior that is not limited to "harmless" racism, ethnocentrism, and bigotry.

At present, conservatives live in a post-truth universe: a dangerous and frothy mix of guns, god, religion, Fox News, Christian Dominionism, conspiracy theories, and Right-wing talk radio form the boundaries of their cognition and perception. The elites on the Right know that this world is an artifice and a construction based on a lie; the foot soldiers and the base really and truly believe that the lies which are spun by their social betters and "influentials" are in fact true. All Americans suffer because this particularly virulent strain of abnormal politics makes consensus on matters and challenges of shared concern almost impossible to attain.

All Things Considered offered several particularly rich examples of these processes at work. For those of us who are trying to make sense of Romney's Svengali-like hold on post-truth, conservative voters (and right- leaning independents), these exchanges are quite instructive.
The first is as follows:

So why continue beating this drum? 

Partly because people believe it. 

"We think that the fact that the work requirement has been taken out of welfare is the wrong thing to do," said Peggy Testa, attending a Tuesday rally near Pittsburgh for Romney running mate Rep. Paul Ryan. 

When told that's not actually what had happened, Testa replied: "At this point, [I] don't know exactly what is true and what isn't, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket, and I do not trust Obama."

The language here is immediately problematic.

One must ask who are the "people" who believe Romney's lies? White conservatives and low information voters are not a cohort that can or should be extended to include people of color. "People" should not be assumed to include those other members of the public who can readily see through Mitt Romney's lies about welfare reform and other issues.

Politics is also about how morality is tied to issues of policy, notions of citizenship, inclusion, and belonging in a given society. When the country's fault lines of race, class, and gender intersect with issues of public policy, these questions of morality become even more central and important. Political discourse is inherently a normative project, discussions of race and poverty even more so.

When Peggy Testa uses the word "wrong" to discuss welfare, she is offering up a judgement about certain  types of people and her relationship, be it imagined or real, with and to them. Many of these assumptions are fueled by stereotypes and inaccurate, second hand knowledge, about people of color and the poor.

Race matters. But, I would suggest that the most element in Peggy Testa's interview with NPR is how she emphasizes the importance of "trust." Romney has repeatedly demonstrated how he is a liar and untrustworthy; yet, Obama is somehow deemed to be not worthy of her trust. 

This can be explained by measures of relateability, idolization, and empathy. Romney is white and a conservative with values that are (ostensibly) similar to Testa's. Obama is none of those things. As such, emotion trumps reason and empirical fact. Given what research tells us about the relationship between symbolic racism, white racial resentment, and subconscious white racial bias, Obama is viewed by Peggy Testa, and those others who are stuck in the myopia of the white racial frame, as a perennial outsider and Other.

Testa and other members of the public have also been subjected to several years of a coordinated effort by the New Right and the Conservative mass media, to depict Barack Obama as illegitimate, a criminal, a fraud, and as a person who is not fit for the Office of the President of the United States of America. Moreover, the Right-wing media exists in a state of epistemic closure. Consequently, Testa, and other members of the Right-wing base, are not exposed to information that challenges their priors or views of reality. These factors have an impact on conservative and right-leaning independent voters and their political decision-making in ways that should not be minimized or overlooked.

Ultimately, Barack Obama's "blackness" is trumped by Romney's whiteness in Testa's voting calculations. Moreover, trust is in many ways first and foremost about being to able to give a person the benefit of the doubt, to treat them as you would like to be treated as you are guided by principles of human empathy. 

Peggy Testa and Mitt Romney may be worlds apart in terms of resources, power, privilege, and opportunity. But for Testa, they are tied together by a shared racial identity--which by implication includes a set of "white" political and social values--that a black man like Barack Obama could never shatter or break. 

Despite its obligatory seriousness, NPR's feature on Romney's welfare lies also has a moment of dark and unintentionally ironic humor:

Another Romney supporter at the Ryan rally said it's really tough to know what's true anymore.

"I think we always have to look at who the fact checkers are," Ken Mohn said. "There's lots of ... groups that purport themselves to be neutral, nonpartisan, but often are [partisan]."

Mohn's interview would be a great fit for a Woody Allen movie. Ken Mohn is a "victim" of Romney's lies and the Right-wing propaganda machine. But, he does not connect his confusion to how voters like him are being subjected to distortions, lies, and misrepresentations of reality by Romney and his agents in the news media. Ken Mohn is disoriented by contemporary American politics; nevertheless, he wants to stay close to the very actors who are responsible for his confusion. Pathetic. Sad.

Historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and others who study race and the reproduction of racial ideologies often use W.E.B. Du Bois' classic phrase "the wages of whiteness." This language is shorthand for the unearned privileges of whiteness that are accrued by its owners, and which they are psychologically, materially, and politically invested in both protecting and expanding. In all, it is a powerful concept that explains the semi-permanence of the color line in America.

The wages of whiteness are also a type of political capital. Mitt Romney has a deep reservoir of that resource. 

He has decided that racist ads and slogans which try to link Barack Obama to the racially charged imagery of black "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" makes good political sense. White voters such as Ken Mohn and Peggy Testa are the target audience for such appeals. If NPR's story on All Things Considered is any indication, white racial resentment and anxiety is the new/old Confederate money--except that it spends quite well within the Republican Party and among its potential voters.